2024 Summer School: High-Schoolers Build 9 Brain-Machine Interfaces!
— Written by Jelena Ciric —
This summer, we’ve beat our own record: in just under two weeks, 20 high-schoolers created nine projects using what is shaping up to be our most creative neuroscience kit ever!
The tool (or should we say meta-tool?) called Neuro:Bit lets you build brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) that work using your body’s electrical signals. Depending on the project, you can design and 3D-print the case of a desired BMI, integrate with an existing gadget such as bluetooth headphones, or even cut the case out of cardboard. What you need are two things: a Neuro:Bit to pick up your body’s electrical signals that power the interface, and one or more Micro:Bits, the famed microcontrollers designed by Microsoft and BBC, to add more functionality.
This summer school was the first time the Neuro:Bit was let into the wild. Straight away, it demonstrated an ability to integrate different disciplines. “It’s another of our democratic tools where neuroscience overlaps with electrical engineering, physical science, math, anatomy, so you can easily inject or sprinkle neuroscience into the classroom. When you look at things that inspire people, it’s all interdisciplinary and it’s all about collaborations between individuals rather than competition,” says Alex Hatch, our product designer, inventor and roboticist.
So who are the kids who gave a whirl to Neuro:Bit this summer? They all come from Belgrade or thereabouts, and most of them had little to no prior experience with programming or building things. Yet it didn’t stop them from creating their very own BMIs with the help of several undergraduates from the University of Michigan as well as our resident scientists. “It tooks them just a few days to go from zero to making computers that do amazing stuff,” our co-founder Dr. Greg Gage points out. “Last year, we developed a whole bunch of neuroscience experiments. But this year, we decided to do something different. We’re going to use the info that comes out of the brain (through muscles, eyes, heart) and have them take that info and convert it into a creative devices. It lays on the creativity aspect.”
The kids worked in 2 separate cohorts, having only five days each to build their machines from scratch. All the projects are now getting written up in our docs repository, along with full tutorials as well as Python/Java Script codes and ready-made STL files for 3D printing. Meanwhile, here’s a foretaste of what you can expect!
TABLE OF CONTENTS: Neuro:Bit Student Projects
- Heart:Bit
- Cowboy Duel
- Snooze Smacker
- Beat:Bite
- MyoTyper
- Neuro:Talk
- EMG Game Console
- Dino Jump Game
- The War Game
Brain-Machine Interfaces: Student Projects
Heart:Bit
Does building a BMI sound too complicated for teenagers to do? Take it from Andrija Gajic, high-schooler who just invented and built Heart:Bit BMI: “I worked on it alone, wrote it fully in Python, and did it all in 3 days. But you don’t even have to know Python to be able to do it. Instead, you can use the block-based Scratch. It’s so easy that it can even be done in primary school,” Andrija tells us.
So what does his BMI do? It converts human physiological responses into music. Your heart rate, measured by an oximeter attached to your index finger, determines the tempo. Flexing your muscles controls the volume, whereas changing your hand position plays the actual tones in C Major scale. If you’d like an octave higher or lower, two buttons will do that. Just enough to play, for example, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. One can only hope that this rendition would please the grumpy old Ludwig!
Cowboy Duel
Designed by Petar Barlov, this quick-drop BMI game works on a simple premise: (s)he who shoots first, wins. In neuroscience terms, the cowboy with a faster reaction time will win!
Both players get a plastic 3D-printed handgun toy with an in-built display. When they hear the sound and see a red signal on the display, they shoot. The BMI is hooked up to their biceps via two electrodes to capture their EMG. So the players don’t have to fight over who won: the display shows W for win, L for lose.
It was Petar’s very first time working on a project like this, but he wouldn’t let himself be disheartened. “At first, I thought I’d never finish this! But then I started working on it and, with some help from the mentors, solved all major problems within several hours. In fact, some of these problems now seem pretty dumb to me!”
Snooze Smacker
This project’s name is pretty self-explanatory. It works on EOG signals collected from your eye movement. Blink two times, and the Neuro:Bit measures your threshold of your blink action potentials. Then close your eyes for 6 seconds or more, and you’ll get a gentle but resolute slap.
“I especially liked the mentors who not only helped me with the project but gave me directions on my options for the future. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to study,” says Ana Markovic, one of the co-creators of Snooze Smacker. (Editor’s note: it probably begins with an N and ends with an E.) Both she and her lab mate Milica Ivankovic have done a lot of programming in school, but it took this hands-on experience to connect the dots and make it fully applicable. “What really helped is that they let us do everything ourselves, although not on our own,” Ana concludes.
We wish we’d invented this when we were still students!
Beat:Bite
Picture this: You’re lounging on your couch, listening to music via your earphones. Want to skip a song? Stop fumbling with your earbuds and just bite into your favorite snack!
This project, a brainchild of high-schoolers Pavle and Kosta, lets a set of bluetooth earphones interface with your jaw muscles so that you can skip a song by clenching your jaw. The kids plan on sharing their experience with their schoolmates—and making a strong case for snacks in class!
Disclaimer: Not recommended for popcorn lovers—clenching your jaw with a bowl of popcorn at hand might result in an endless skip loop. Proceed with caution!
MyoTyper
Not all of our Fellows’ brain-machine interfaces our Fellows require a 3D printer or laser cutting. Some are made using scraps anyone can find around, like cardboard, straw, chopstick or even a tree branch.
The MyoTyper is case in point. It’s a lo-fi analog keyboard that’s powered by EMG signals coming from your arm or leg. Once it’s set up, all you need to do is flex your muscle once to move from letter to letter, and flex it twice to select a letter.
Neuro:Talk
Our first project that converts your muscle activity into communication, Neuro:Talk contains one Neuro:Bit and one Micro:Bit for the interlocutors, plus a rotating pointer that’s actually a servo motor tucked into a plastic cup.
Best of all, your subjects will speak different languages! One person asks a yes or no question emulating dashes and dots from Morse code with their muscles, and the other answers using sign language motions.
EMG Game Console
If there’s one thing better than nerding out over retro games, it’s creating one yourself. Bonus points if it can be played with your arm muscles or even eyes! Our fellows Aleksa, Jovana, Vukasin and Vuk settled on Tug of War as their game of choice. But you can go ahead and experiment with anything else.
As two players flex their forearm muscles as strongly as they can, the flag on the display goes one way or the other. To spice things up, they 3D-printed a physical model with gearing and mechanism that emulates what’s happening on screen. That last bit is particularly great for practicing industrial design that’s translatable to 3D.
Dino Jump Game
Another lo-fi game that caught our fellows’ attention is the dino jumping over cacti that gets displayed on Chrome when there’s no internet. So Anastasija, Elena and Milan decided to make this game physical. They took paper and cardboard scraps, toothpicks, strings and duct tape, and cobbled together a setup where a moving track carries a bunch of cacti. But it’s up to you for how long the dino will manage to stay alive. You’re making it jump by flexing your muscles!
It’s exactly projects like this one that are meant to stimulate creativity. But the fellows’ resourcefulness surprised even our senior scientists like Dr. Gage. “They used tools I’d never thought they’d use, like an old biscuit box. That type of stuff is going to pay dividends in the future when they start to approach a problem and think about it in different aspects. What people often overlook is that the major breakthroughs in science happen because they went and saw something that everyone else sees, but they looked at it from a different point of view. We’re combining neuroscience and art together to get people to start thinking more creatively,” he says.
The War Game
Our fellows Todor and Mila didn’t build their project on a computer game. Instead, they chose medieval-style game of arrows and shields that they both played in kindergarten. Each of the two players either shoots an arrow or shields themselves from one by using their arm muscles. There’s a pair of robots that play it out, and every move you make can turn out to be an advantage or a vulnerability. The point is to shoot wisely as you only have so many arrows!
Like all other projects from this year’s summer fellowship, this one is also based on an electrophysiology and coding combo. “Biology is my personal favorite, but the programming aspect is what makes it even more exciting,” Todor concludes. He thinks workshops such as this one is exactly what schools are missing so that kids could build an affinity towards science. His lab mate Mila Urosevic wants to do robotics and programming, and this Fellowship was her first shot at it. Pun intended!