ENGINEER SPOTLIGHT: Daniel Moran - Biomedical Engineer
- Mind Games
"I wanted to do this my whole life,” says
Daniel Moran, a biomedical engineering professor at
Washington University. As a bright kid growing up in
the 1970s, Moran was a devoted fan of “The Six
Million Dollar Man”— a TV show about an
astronaut who is “rebuilt” with bionics
after a serious crash. The show’s opening lines
still resonate with him: “Gentlemen, we can rebuild
him. We have the technology. We have the capability
to make the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin
will be that man. We can make him better than he was.
Better. Stronger. Faster.”
Moran isn’t giving anyone arms with the strength
of bulldozers or eyeballs equipped with night vision
and zoom features, but he is working toward his childhood
dream of using technology to mend people with serious
injuries. Moran’s latest efforts could prove to
be even more impressive than anything the TV writers
dreamed up for Steve Austin.
Working in collaboration with neurosurgeon Eric C.
Leuthardt, Moran is developing technology that enables
people to move objects on a computer screen using only
their minds. No joystick. No keyboard. No motion sensors.
Just the electrical signals from their brains. In their
most recent experiment, Moran and his coworkers were
able to get a 14-year-old boy to play the classic arcade
game “Space Invaders” with nothing but his
imagination.
The teenager was undergoing treatment for epilepsy,
which involves surgically placing an electronic grid
directly onto the surface of the brain. The patient
stays in the hospital for about a week so doctors can
monitor the grid for signals in the brain that pinpoint
the focus areas of seizures, with the aim of removing
that area.
“When patients are undergoing the seizure monitoring,
they’re in bed all the time,” Moran says.
It can get pretty boring, and that can be a problem
because the inactive patients tend to have few seizures,
making it more difficult to locate the area of the brain
responsible for the seizures.
Moran’s group hit upon a way to help the teen
pass the time and also get valuable information at the
same time. They were able to interface the monitoring
system with the “Space Invaders” software,
which they then programmed so that when the teenager
made certain movements, those motions would initiate
movement in the video game.
Moving his tongue would move the video game’s
laser cannon. Wiggling his fingers would make the cannon
shoot. Next, they asked the teen to think about those
movements, but to not really do them. It wasn’t
long before the teenager was playing the game just by
thinking about it.
Of course, the goal isn’t to get people to throw
out their handheld controllers and play video games
with their brains. Rather, Moran thinks the technology
could someday help quadriplegics and people with degenerative
muscle diseases interface with computers and control
wheelchairs with just their minds.
It might even lead to a new generation of smart prosthetics
that can be controlled just by thinking about it—not
that different from the way people move the limbs they
were born with. Shades of “The Six Million Dollar
Man” indeed.
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