Assistive Neurotechnology Takes Flight at TED2023

NeuroFly software toolkit used by OpenBCI and Christian Bayerlein for onstage drone flight demo is available free and open source.

Download NeuroFly software HERE

Vancouver, BC — April 20, 2023

Christian Bayerlein is a German technologist and disabled rights activist living with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a genetic disease that affects the motor neurons that control voluntary muscle movement. Yesterday onstage at TED2023, Christian and OpenBCI founder Conor Russomanno demonstrated how residual muscle activity from Christian’s body could be repurposed to control and fly a drone. Christian, an early backer of OpenBCI’s original Kickstarter campaign in 2013, has been collaborating with OpenBCI over the past several months to realize this long-standing dream.

“Flying a drone has always been a dream of mine,” said Bayerlein, “I see it as a way to experience a sense of freedom and independence that is often limited by my disability. I’ve always been fascinated by aviation and the feeling of soaring through the air, and being able to pilot a drone using my brain signals was an incredible experience that I will never forget.”

The TED Talk and demonstration are part of the larger “NeuroFly” project which will culminate in the release of a documentary and open-source software toolkit for replicating the demonstration. The NeuroFly project is made possible through resources and expertise donated by Lenovo, Formlabs, and Varjo.

To make the demo possible, OpenBCI worked with Christian to identify the four muscle groups that he could most reliably activate and placed electrodes on these muscles. OpenBCI’s hardware and software were used to translate each muscle’s activation into digital sliders that Christian learned to control. Signal processing and fine-tuned filtering helped eliminate false-positives and enable the thresholds of the joystick to adapt specifically to Christian and to variations across sessions. These sliders were then mapped to a new digital joystick. With practice, Christian was able to learn how to use the new controls to gain full control over the drone. By connecting the drone’s camera to a Varjo Aero, Christian was able to fly in first person over the TED audience.

The process is like learning how to use a keyboard for the first time; with practice the brain adapts and learns how to use the new controls effortlessly. The same sensors and interaction methods used for NeuroFly could be applied to control a range of physical or digital tools.

“This project with Christian has been years in the making, and I’m ecstatic we were finally able to realize it as part of TED,” OpenBCI CEO Conor Russomanno commented. “I believe that sensors like the ones in NeuroFly and Galea will come to define the next major revolution in computing technology. How we interact with these next-gen computers will be continuously optimized based on the individual user’s actions and physiological reactions. I’m excited to see the new types of content and control schemes that can be created with these building blocks in the coming years”

The NeuroFly software toolkit will be released free and open-source so that others can use it as a starting point for their own projects. To be notified when the toolkit becomes available, sign up at openbci.com/neurofly

Additional NeuroFly Toolkit Info:
https://docs.openbci.com/Software/OpenBCISoftware/NeuroFly_Toolkit/

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