Brain–computer interface: trend, challenges, and threats

Abstract

Brain–computer interface (BCI), an emerging technology that facilitates communication between brain and computer, has attracted a great deal of research in recent years. Researchers provide experimental results demonstrating that BCI can restore the capabilities of physically challenged people, hence improving the quality of their lives. BCI has revolutionized and positively impacted several industries, including entertainment and gaming, automation and control, education, neuromarketing, and neuroergonomics. Notwithstanding its broad range of applications, the global trend of BCI remains lightly discussed in the literature. Understanding the trend may inform researchers and practitioners on the direction of the field, and on where they should invest their efforts more. Noting this significance, we have analyzed 25,336 metadata of BCI publications from Scopus to determine advancement of the field. The analysis shows an exponential growth of BCI publications in China from 2019 onwards, exceeding those from the United States that started to decline during the same period. Implications and reasons for this trend are discussed. Furthermore, we have extensively discussed challenges and threats limiting exploitation of BCI capabilities. A typical BCI architecture is hypothesized to address two prominent BCI threats, privacy and security, as an attempt to make the technology commercially viable to the society.

What are community perspectives regarding brain- computer interfaces? A cross-sectional study of community-dwelling adults in the UK

“…Our study also identi ed the high cost of invasive BCI devices as a major concern in uencing the participants' decision to adopt a device. This can potentially lead to unequal access to BCIs thereby exacerbating the socio-economic gap by limiting the ability to access opportunities and the overall wellbeing of a person (49).…”

East Asian perspective of responsible research and innovation in neurotechnology

“…The reason for this is that basic research on BCI has been accumulated over many years as a fundamental technology for Neurotechnology, and the term BCI has been included in the guidance by FDA-CDHR as well as in the consideration of industrial standards by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). In this study, a bibliometric analysis of scholarly articles on BCI research in the Scopus data from 1982 to August 2022 ( Maiseli et al, 2023 ) and a survey study on bibliometric analysis of peer-reviewed review articles on BCI research extracted using One Search, a data mining tool that accesses 252 databases including BioOne, Google Scholar, JSTOR, ProQuest, and PubMed ( Alharbi, 2023 ) were referenced. The former is suitable for identifying general trends in BCI research for one of the world's largest scientific literature databases, while the latter is for peer-reviewed review articles extracted from a variety of scientific literature databases to identify trends in the countries including group of researchers with higher expertise and broader knowledge of BCI research.…”

“…According to the paper dealing bibliometric analysis of academic papers on BCI using Scopus data from 1982 to August 2022, the U.S. has the largest cumulative number of papers, accounting for 17.3% of the analyzed group of papers, followed by China in second place (14.6%), then Germany (5.7%), the United Kingdom (5.02%) and Japan (5.01%) ( Maiseli et al, 2023 ). Looking at the annual trend of the cumulative number of academic papers, the Asian continent, and East Asia in particular, has seen a rapid increase in the number of papers published since the mid-2010 s (see Figure 2 in Maiseli et al, 2023 ). Fig.…”

“…While the number of academic papers published in China has been steadily increasing, Korea and Japan have shown a slowing trend in recent years, and Korea was to fall behind India in 2022. Table 2 summarizes the total number of academic papers based on Scopus data on BCI research ( Maiseli et al, 2023 ) and review articles extracted based on bibliographic data in One Search ( Alharbi, 2023 ), by country. While Japan has a relatively large number of academic papers published, it is surprising that the number of review papers published zero, as reported in Alharbi's paper ( 2023 ).…”

“…and with the cooperation of the clinical medicines. In the early 2000 s, BCI with unit recording reached the stage of clinical research ( Hochberg, et al, 2006 ), then through the 2010 s, applied research using BCI and research on improving and upgrading elemental technologies such as sensing, signal processing and decoding became popular ( Alharbi, 2023 , Kawala-Sterniuk et al, 2021 , Maiseli et al, 2023 , Saha et al, 2021 ). Around the same time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Center for Devices and Radiological Health (FDA-CDHR) initiated a study to prepare for an approval review of BCI based on its practical feasibility in clinical practice ( Bowsher et al, 2016 ); the FDA-CDHR issued “leap-frog” guidance in May 2021 with recommendations for the design of nonclinical and clinical testing using BCI devices for patients with paralysis or amputation ( Department of Health and Human Services et al, 2021 ), also see https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/statement-fda-commissioner-scott-gottlieb-md-efforts-spur-development-innovative-devices-including ).…”