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Home > News > Reading minds

Reading minds

Cover of the Spring 2017 Berkeley Engineer magazine, featuring Costas Spanos biking past the new Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
May 1, 2017
This article appeared in Berkeley Engineer magazine, Spring 2017
  • In this issue
    Students with 3D printer waste

    Smart moves

    Cartoon from story on campus startups

    Startups on campus

    Dean Shankar Sastry introduces a faculty panel at a Dean’s Society event

    Dean's word

    Upfront

    • Lab to table
    • Carol Christ named chancellor
    • Crowdfunding disperses capital
    • Boosting robotics in manufacturing
    • Exercising with Cal Fitness
    • Q+A on resilient communities
    • Comments
    • High jump
    • Reading minds
    • Safer transfusions
    • The rule-breaker
    • Small wonder

    Alumni notes

    • NAE Class of 2017
    • Four alumni named to Forbes' 30­-Under­-30 list
    • Shielding ice sheets
    • New UC Davis chancellor
    • Bob Jewett's double life
    • Farewell
  • Past issues
Model head with headset

Photo by Max Curran

Looking for better cybersecurity? Forget about typing in passwords or scanning fingerprints. The next frontier of identity verification is passthoughts, the recognition of unique brainwave patterns that occur when we perform mental tasks. Now, in a significant advancement of this technology, electrical engineering and computer sciences and School of Information professor John Chuang and his research team at the BioSENSE Lab have created a passthought reader that can authenticate the wearer by reading their brainwaves. Wearing the device, users can log into their devices and accounts when they picture a specific thought. This new wearable uses an ordinary set of earbuds fitted with electroencephalograph (EEG) sensors, unlike previous versions that placed electrodes across the user’s forehead or scalp. The researchers plan to develop a real-world version of the device, as well as fine-tune its accuracy to be more responsive to the wearer’s mental and physical states.

Topics: Devices & inventions, Electrical engineering, Research, Security & privacy
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