Think and You Shall See

April 12, 2012 - Samsung has been granted a new patent covering an implantable medical device that can read a person's eye movements, brainwaves, and some movement of or within the person.  It has just been granted, so patent pictures are not available at the time of this posting, but a full text of the application is available at the jump.

This device could be capable of expanding doctors' awareness of our mental and physiological state by having a record of what our bodies have been doing.  Furthermore, since it operates from the brain off of neurological signals, it can act as an early-warning indicator for strokes and could possibly reveal new insights on the state of coma victims.

Some mind-machine interfaces, like Braingate, focus on man controlling machine, externally.  Samsung's innovation is let machine augment the man, acting as a little black box for a human.  This could be the first real, acceptable leap in human augmentation.  Then again, like Braingate, they could be more focused on patent accumulation and not have the drive to bring this idea to reality.  Only time will tell.

Full application here.