Nissan is developing brainwave technology to read and augment driver’s mind (not replace it)

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This car tech makes you a bet­ter dri­ver by read­ing your mind. We gave it a test dri­ve (The Wash­ing­ton Post):

“Might the car of the future be able to read your mind?

At CES, the big tech trade show, cars dom­i­nat­ed much of the con­ver­sa­tion. But one expe­ri­ence stood out because it was so far-out: I donned an exper­i­men­tal cap from Nis­san that inter­pret­ed sig­nals from my brain with the goal of mak­ing me a bet­ter driver.

..brain data is use­ful for cars with semi­au­tonomous capa­bil­i­ties, says Lucian Ghe­o­rghe, the Nis­san sci­en­tist behind this tech. Cer­tain brain waves, researchers have found, can be inter­pret­ed as a sig­nal you want to turn the wheel, up to half a sec­ond before you actu­al­ly do so. Brain­wave could pre­dict you want to turn, and the car’s arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence could start action before your hands do.

“The idea is to try to build a part­ner from the AI, not to use the AI itself as a replace­ment,” says Ghe­o­rghe. “Then every dri­ver can dri­ve better.”

Nis­san prob­a­bly doesn’t want to be in the busi­ness of mak­ing brain-read­ing hats, says Ghe­o­rghe. But it wants to be pre­pared for a future where brain-read­ing tech­nol­o­gy might be some­thing peo­ple use at home or work already, and can bring with them into the car. “We are becom­ing a man­u­fac­tur­er of brain-con­nect­ed ready vehi­cles,” he says.

News in Context

• Next: Trans­lat­ing brain activ­i­ty sig­nals into dri­ving and oth­er com­put­er-assist­ed interactions
• Key patent: Improv­ing dri­ving safe­ty with alarms trig­gered by impend­ing sleep state, detect­ed via brain signals
• Info­graph­ic on Per­va­sive Neurotechnologies
• 10 neu­rotech­nolo­gies about to trans­form brain enhance­ment and brain health
• Ses­sion from the 2015 Sharp­Brains Vir­tu­al Sum­mit, includ­ing  what oth­er car man­u­fac­tur­ers have been doing: