Many of the students with disabilities that Eli Kinney-Lang, assistant professor at University of Calgary's Department of Biomedical Engineering, works with are “really bright kids who are on grade level, have friends, but they are reliant on assistive technology to interact with the world around them,” he says. “But sometimes that assistive technology isn’t actually a good fit for them, because it still relies on some amount of motor control, and some kids just might not have that.”
BCI systems can also open up an entirely different dimension of communication for certain students with disabilities. Kinney-Lang explains that normally, a communication partner has to first ask the student a question before they can communicate. They must wait for someone to ask, “Are you thirsty?” to reply, “Yes, I am thirsty.” With the assistance of a BCI system, however, the student can immediately say that they are thirsty or ask for water without waiting for a prompt.
Devices Should Be Designed With Children In Mind
The potential is certainly there for bringing BCI into the classroom to assist students with disabilities, even if it might be at least a decade out, as Kinney-Lang predicts. BCI is a relatively nascent technology, and this is even more true for pediatric BCI. While today's consumer-grade BCI headsets can be useful for certain basic tasks, they were designed with adults in mind. Pediatric BCI systems, on the other hand, require a fundamentally different design than adult systems.
"People think kids are tiny adults, and they are wildly different,” Kinney-Lang says. “We should try and improve this technology for kids and really focus on pediatrics, because that scales really well to adults. But building something for an adult does not guarantee that it can scale down.”
For children, personalizing the technology and hardware will be essential if it is to be successful. Instead of working to build a one-size-fits-all option, Kinney-Lang emphasizes that BCI research should be more focused on a “one-size-fits-one” option.
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Theresa Vaughan, who has spent more than 25 years on BCI-focused clinical research studies and now serves as administrative director at the National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies, also believes that “the development of BCI for children should not be an afterthought. Those devices can give access to children who have never had control over anything, and it might expand their repertoire. It’s a tool for them.”
Although implanted BCIs exist, they’re mostly for adult users, so Kinney-Lang sees the headset becoming more common in the classroom environment.
“There’s very little risk there, other than disappointment and maybe discomfort, depending on headsets pushing on pressure points,” he says. “But that’s where occupational therapists and caregivers are excellent at knowing how to try to make it work.”
Schools Should Consider Data Privacy and Training Prior to Adoption
Successful classroom adoption will also depend on partnering with educators, integrating teacher training to demystify the technology and addressing budget limitations.
There’s also the issue of data privacy, especially when working with extremely vulnerable children. While regulations and laws still need to be created around BCI technology, Kinney-Lang is doing what he can from an engineering perspective to keep brain data safe and secure.
“Right now, the raw brain data comes off the headset and it goes to a computer, and the computer processes the data,” he says. “And to me, there’s a security risk there, because who owns that computer? Who can read that sort of thing? This becomes a bit of a concern.”
By miniaturizing the data processing to a microcontroller that exists on the BCI headset instead of sending the data to a computer to be processed, the raw brain data would never leave the chip.
While researchers continue to tackle neuroprivacy concerns, Kinney-Lang compares current BCI technology to the early days of virtual reality and says that there is huge potential but many layers of complexity to consider.
“If you come at it thinking this is going to be a magic assistive technology that’s going to work out of the box and be perfect, I would temper expectations,” he says. “It’s going to take effort and collaboration to build that out for the next generation of BCI users, the next generation of children who will need assistive technology. And that’s where my field is trying to help.”
