Can your brain communicate directly with a computer?
At Meta Reality Labs, the new name for Facebook Reality Labs, the team wanted to answer this question using the Photon Force PF32 camera, our customised firmware and multispeckle Diffuse Correlation Spectroscopy (DCS).
The team’s research into developing possible brain/computer interface techniques focused around blood flow changes in specific areas of the brain correlating with neuronal activity in those same areas.
DCS is a promising, non-invasive optical technique for monitoring cerebral blood flow and measuring cortex functional activation tasks, however, current DCS tools have a trade-off between sensitivity to the cortex and signal to noise ratio (SNR).
How Photon Force technology helped accelerate brain/computer interface research
The team at Meta Reality Labs needed the ability to look at more than one speckle at time, but current DCS systems and health and safety protocol prevented this.
The team had heard about Photon Force’s PF32 camera range, and were keen to find out more about the 1000 pixels’ worth of detectors contained within it that were fast enough and sensitive enough to measure multiple speckles at one time.
Using a diffuser in front of the PF32 camera, a sugar cube in this instance, the researchers shone a light through and captured the speckle field. They then moved the diffuser around, noted that speckle patterns were showing up on the camera, and were able to measure the data. The conclusion was that a multispeckle DCS system using the PF32 SPAD camera is a scalable method for achieving high sensitivity DCS measurements.
