Ashley Feinsinger
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Neuroscience
Implanted brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are devices placed in the brain that read neural activity so a person can control a computer, a cursor or a communication system. The first human trials, called early feasibility studies, enroll only a handful of volunteers with serious motor or communication disabilities for whom existing assistive technology is not enough.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
- Topics
brain-computer interface
implanted neurotechnology
early feasibility studies
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2029
What they work on
- Analyze the current state of participant engagement practices in implanted brain-computer interface research through qualitative interviews with four stakeholder groups, including participants, researchers and advocacy organizations.
- Co-create a framework to guide the design of participant engagement practices specifically for brain-computer interface early feasibility studies, using Human Centered Design principles.
- Pilot the engagement framework and an online interface for implementing it within real ongoing brain-computer interface studies, producing a tool the BCI community can use and refine.
- Generate findings on how ethics frameworks can be disseminated through usable tools rather than publications alone.
More about the research
These volunteers undergo brain surgery and years of intensive involvement with no promise of personal medical benefit. Their experiences, knowledge and values matter enormously, yet the field has only vaguely considered what it means to engage participants as partners, and researchers have little practical guidance for doing so with people currently enrolled in trials.
Why it matters
People with severe paralysis or loss of speech are the first volunteers in implanted brain-computer interface trials, bearing surgery and years of burden. As companies move to bring these neurotechnologies to market, a practical framework and online tool for engaging participants could help research teams co-create devices with the people who use them, making it likelier that future BCIs deliver meaningful benefits to enough people to be sustainable.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Mohsen Rakhshan
University of Central Florida, FL·Computer Science
Map the research- and national-security risk landscape of neurotechnology across different recording and stimulation modalities and hardware/software platforms, identifying where vulnerabilities concentrate.
Karunesh Ganguly
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Neuroscience
Compare two neural decoding methods for their ability to give paralyzed patients stable, plug-and-play control of a robotic arm and hand with ECoG for at least 8 weeks without recalibration.
Jonathan Kao
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Train new recurrent neural network architectures on the decision-making and movement tasks animals perform, constrained by anatomy and neural recordings, then analyze them to propose mechanisms of cortical computation.
The school
University of California-Los Angeles: 84 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 803 research doctorates a year.
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