Emotionally-intelligent PC

While there's a lot more to flying a plane than just steering, pilots seated in a flight simulator wearing an EEG cap (an electrode studded cap that reads brain activity) were recently able to direct a plane's flight path hands free - just by picturing a joystick in their mind's eye. Predictably enough, this whipped up more than a fair share of media stories about "science fiction-style mind control." But the application of this technology is decades away - and even then, it's really only intended for disabled pilots.

Each of the five research groups involved in the EU-funded Brainflight project had different goals with more immediate applications.

"I think that it is important to apply this technology to other areas - and it will most certainly be applied to other areas first," Tim Fricke, Brainflight's coordinator, from the Institute for Flight System Dynamics in Munich, said to DW.

Getting the public's interest

Fricke does admit, however, that Brainflight's press release played up the sci-fi scenario on purpose. A lot of research had gone into Brainflight before the airplane stunt, but lab experiments aren't sexy enough to spur media coverage, according to Fricke.

While it might not be flashy enough for reporters right now, the technology developed by Fricke and his colleagues has great potential. It could make working on a computer much easier - by giving the PC access to our thoughts and feelings via brain-computer interfaces (BCI). For Brainflight researcher Thorsten O. Zander, Professor at the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin), this was what the project was all about.

"I think that we can build up new interfaces that take a lot of information into account about the user, like tone of voice, gestures, mimicry," Zander told DW. "When I'm communicating with a computer system today, I usually only give direct commands: I type in something or a move a cursor."

A computer doesn't record a user's frustration when something isn't working properly, or the impatience when a program takes too long to start - yet. "With BCI, we can give the missing information," Zander explained. "The machine could estimate whether I'm busy at the moment, whether I'm happy with the situation, whether I'm aware of problems."

The technology could resemble a smart version of Clippy, the animated paperclip from the Microsoft Office programs. Clippy would always pop up at the most inopportune moments and then it just wouldn't go away. A computer with a kind of emotional intelligence could see when the user needed help and only then send Clippy bouncing onto the screen.

Helping doctors save lives

Brainflight coordinator Tim Fricke said that "if you look into history, you can see many times that aviation research has pioneered new technologies."

Thorsten Zander wants to put the results of the Brainflight research to use in hospitals. He is currently working on a system to help surgeons in the operating theater using brain-computer interfaces. The plan is to have a computer estimate the surgeon's state of mind and communicate it to his colleagues.

"If the surgeon is concentrating really hard on something, doing a really complex operation, this might be displayed by a little red light, so all the colleagues know to hold their questions," Zander said. "We can give information about the state of a human being to a computer without having to communicate that voluntarily or directly or through speech."

Brainflight on the road

Brain-computer interaction has not only been tested in the air. There have been experiments monitoring brain activity in car-drivers, too.

"What car manufacturers are most interested in is that you might be able to detect times when someone is not concentrating at all on driving the car, because they're falling asleep," said Alan Blackwell from the Department of Neuroscience at Cambridge University.

Test drivers have been hooked up to EEG caps and skin conductors, but it's been found that a dashboard-mounted camera aimed at the driver's eyes is the best-suited technology for monitoring drowsiness.

Blackwell emphasized that researchers shouldn't get ahead of themselves. "I think imagining the things that technology might do for us in the far future is still an important thing to do, but we have to keep our head in the clouds and our feet on the ground, as my head of department used to say."