The Researchers Call for Attention to Neurodata Privacy


2021-08-28   T|T

In recent years, significant advances in wearable technology and computational intelligence have greatly improved the performance and capabilities of EEG-based BCI (eBCI) and pushed them out of the laboratory and into the real world. This rapid transformation constitutes a paradigm shift in human-computer interaction that will profoundly change different industries in the near future, including healthcare, entertainment, security, education and marketing.

Transcending the brain's biological limitations and using your mind to interact with and control external electronic devices sounds like a distant cyborg future, but it may be coming sooner than we think.

The most promising way to achieve real-world BCI applications is through electroencephalography, a non-invasive way of monitoring the brain through its electrical activity. Eeg-based BCI, or eBCI for short, will require several technological advances before widespread use, but more importantly, they will raise various social, ethical, and legal issues. In a review of modern commercial brain-computer interface (BCI) devices, researchers from Imperial College London first describe the principles of BCI-related technologies in AIP Publishing's APL Bioengineering, and also discuss the main technical limitations and ethical issues of these devices.

Non-invasive EEG sensors are used to pick up electrical signals generated by neurons in the cerebral cortex. EEG signals can be either obtained from spontaneous endogenous activity in the brain or induced by exogenous stimuli. The original signal is preprocessed, then features are extracted, selected, classified, and translated to decode user intentions. Digital commands are then used to drive different output actuator devices, such as prosthetics, exoskeletons, vehicles, or assistive software.

EEG signals are mainly generated by pyramidal neurons located in layers III and V. These neurons are arranged spatially perpendicular to the cortical surface, forming a dipole layer perpendicular to the surface of the scalp. Eeg activity is measured by recording voltage differences at different locations on the scalp that make up the sum of postsynaptic potentials of thousands of neurons near each recording electrode.

Zou si believes that the protection of individual neural data will become very important in the future. Consumer behavior data, browsing behavior data can be used by businesses to obtain consumers' purchasing preferences, not to mention neural data. In addition to reflecting an individual's true intentions, neural data can also reflect an individual's emotions and cognition. I consider neural data to be the privacy of all private data, as important as an individual's genetic data.

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