Undergraduate researchers combine neuroscience and engineering

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research 1:26 Undergraduate researchers combine neuroscience and engineering

By:

Luke Hayes

1 Apr 2024 400

A team of neuroscience, biomechanical engineering, and electrical engineering students are studying how low-cost EEG caps can be used to control prosthetics. The group is one of many GrayUR teams led by Collegiate Assistant Professor David Gray.

We're an interdisciplinary undergraduate group. We're taking engineers and neuroscientists. What we're doing is we're using Open BCI, which is a low cost bio sensing hardware, EEG cap. And we're going to put that on a couple participants and record their brain signals as they're doing certain activities, such as blinking, clenching their fists, just to see if there's any variance in those signals. And determine thresholds for those variables so that we can make something mechanical happen from that. Our end goal is to make a prosthetic that is controlled by the EEG cap. Participating in this research is what introduced me first to the field of neurotech, which is what I'm interested in now. You see a lot of research surrounding how EEGs can be used in day to day life. While we're focusing mainly on like rehabilitation devices such as prosthetics, there is a wide range of things you can do with this EEG cap. One of the things that I love about Dr. Gray's undergraduate research teams is that he allows that creative direction completely up to us. We can take this research like in any path that we want to.