The three pieces in natHACKS map to the most common use cases for BCI. On the research front, it may include “creating tools to more effectively conduct neuroscience research” with both human and non-human brains, Redman said. On the rehabilitation front, it can help answer questions like “How can we use real-time brain activity to better help someone recover from an injury?” Or if a person has Alzheimer’s disease, “how can we measure the progression of their disease?” One of the projects that came out of NeurAlbertaTech is Koalacademy, a language learning platform that uses brain waves as input. It started with a question: “How do we use brain activity to increase the effectiveness of someone learning Mandarin from English?” It has now been developed in a research program at the School of Rehabilitation Medicine in the department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, said Redman, who leads the core development team. “You take an English word in a Mandarin character. And you look at the brain’s response. And then you can present the same information later and measure whether that initial brain response indicates learning or not.” BCI also has its applications in games and other forms of entertainment. Redman has tackled this with RemBRAINdt, which lets you create art with your brain waves. “It’s pretty much a fun project,” he said, noting, however, that market research funded by the Edmonton Regional Innovation Network yielded promising results. “A lot of things that fly on the wall: What interests people? What sticks?” A more serious area of interest to Redman is the treatment of serious psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. “A lot of what’s happening now, at least at the treatment end, is hitting with pharmacological interventions. I see BCI as a potential route to a more personalized treatment pathway,” he said. A future he is not interested in building is a future where some people have implanted computer accessories. “As you can probably predict, this will go to the highest bidder,” he said. “The upper echelons of society, the rich and the super-rich, are going to make it before anybody else. And so I think that’s fueling the inequality between different socioeconomic statuses. I’m kind of pushing for how we’re going to do this with equipment that’s going to be widely available Here and Now”. With two undergraduate degrees from the University of Alberta under his belt, Redman is headed to Montreal in the fall to continue his studies in neuroscience at McGill University. But he plans to stay at NeurAlbertaTech and found Edmonton a great place to start in that field. “I found the community to be very welcoming,” he said. “And today, we’re getting back to pretty frequent in-person events, which is great. Especially in the health innovator space, there’s a pretty wide range of events coming up.”
