mit's 'brainput' offloads human multitasking to a...
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By Duncan Geere (/search/author/Duncan+Geere) 15 May 12 (Tue, 15 May 2012 13:00:00 +01:00)
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MIT's 'Brainput' offloads humanmultitasking to a computer
A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has
developed an experimental system
(http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/40406/?p1=A1)
that can detect when a human is trying to multitask, and help out.
It's called "Brainput", and is essentially a portable fMRI scanner
combined with software. By measuring and analysing brain activity, the device
detects when you're multitasking and can offload some of that work to a
computer. In a paper, the researchers described how they set up a maze with
two remotecontrolled robots (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012
04/10/robooctopus) that needed to be both navigated simultaneously
switching back and forth between the two.
When Brainput detected that the driver was multitasking, it was able to detect
one of the robots to use its own sensors to help navigate making it partially
autonomous. The operator's overall performance improved, as a result, with
little additional effort, and they didn't seem to notice or get frustrated by the
bot's autonomous behaviour while multitasking.
However, when the researchers tried increasing the autonomy of the robot
when Brainput hadn't indicated that the participant was mentally overloaded,
they found that performance decreased. The autonomy only helped when the
operator wasn't able to keep up (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011
04/12/multitaskingbrains).
"Multitasking has become integral in many aspects of our lives, so there are
opportunities to explore Brainput in other tasks and domains," said the team in
a paper (http://web.mit.edu/erinsol/www/papers/Solovey.CHI.2012.Final.pdf)
(.pdf) detailing the project. "In any activity involving multitasking or information
overload, we could expect to see improvements in the user's performance and
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StoryWritten by Duncan Geere(/search/author/Duncan+Geere)Edited by Nate Lanxon
PhotoMIT
TagsBrains (/tags/Brains),Multitasking(/tags/Multitasking),Robots (/tags/Robots),Brainput(/tags/Brainput), MIT(/tags/MIT), fMRI(/tags/fMRI)
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experience. Some examples of other domains are complex data analytics, air
traffic control and management of multiple unmanned vehicles."
They added that future work could consider other cognitive states where
humans could do with a helping hand from a machine. "An exploration of the
system's ability to distinguish other states could lead to new enhancements at
little to no cost to the operator."
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