Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE) members at the University of Washington (UW) BioRobotics Lab are working on making improvements to privacy and security properties of brain-computer interface (BCI)-enabled technologies. Their research has attracted the attention of media outlets such as Motherboard (VICE), Ars Technica, MIT Technology Review, and most recently, CBC Radio.

“An important thing is that we would like to get out ahead of these problems [neural privacy and security issues] before they happen. With e-mail spam, we didn’t get out ahead of it before it happened. We started this work about four years ago, and our hope was to try and capture the issue, bring it to awareness, and begin to look for solutions before these things happen,” said Howard Chizeck, CSNE member and professor of electrical engineering at the UW, in the CBC Radio interview.

Learn more about CSNE-funded work in neural security at the UW BioRobotics Lab website.