Research Projects
The goal in the Nurmikko Lab is to engineer a system of spatially distributed wireless microchips implanted in the brain cortex, each microchip capable of neural recording and electrical stimulation, to add new capabilities to closed-loop adaptive wireless brain-computer interfaces (BCI).
The engineering approach itself is brain-inspired: In recording neural signals, each microchip, a "neurograin" acts as an event detector for capturing both spiking neurons and field potentials, the latter converted to binary spike trains. Brain inspiration is also behind the invention of a communication protocol suitable for wireless networking of large ensembles of implanted microchips to communicating asynchronously with an external antenna patch on the scalp of the subject. On computational side, our research investigates a neuromorphic neural decoding/encoding approach for means to close the loop for BCI applications using artificial deep-learning, spiking network-based models (SNN).
