Summer Scholars Project Fuses Engineering With Neuroscience

Summer Scholars Project Fuses Engineering With Neuroscience

By Brian Hiro

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Soudeh Khoubrouy came to Cal State San Marcos two years ago with an unorthodox mix of expertise: a background in electrical engineering (in which she holds a Ph.D.) combined with a research interest in neuroscience (in which she has a master's degree).

Entering her third fall as an assistant professor of electrical engineering, Khoubrouy runs the Neural Signal Processing and Artificial Intelligence Research (NSPAIR) Lab, a small room in Academic Hall where she and a group of students work on projects fusing her two academic fields - using engineering skills to advance neuroscience applications.

This summer, the NSPAIR team began a project that they hope could someday contribute to helping people with paralysis use brain signals to accomplish everyday tasks.

As part of the long-running Summer Scholars Programon campus, the three students in Khoubrouy's lab - Aleks Gonzalez, Moises Nelson and Manuel Villa-Hernandez - started modestly. They learned about the electroencephalogram (EEG) cap that Khoubrouy purchased during her first year at CSUSM. The EEG cap is worn over the head, where 32 electrodes connect to the skull (non-invasively), measure brain signals and send them wirelessly to a computer.

The students then learned how to interpret EEG signals and the type of software employed to process them. They also discovered how eye blinking by the person wearing the cap can disrupt the signal and how to remove that interference.

When the fall semester commences, the students will split into teams and continue the project as part of their capstones (all three are senior electrical engineering majors who are on track to graduate next May). Gonzalez and Nelson, joined by a third student, will work with the EEG cap - designing experiments for human subjects (mainly student volunteers) and collecting data. Villa-Hernandez, joined by two other students, will design an interface to allow the team to take brain signals from the cap and use them to control the robotic arm.

Khoubrouy saluted the students for diving headlong into a mostly unfamiliar discipline this summer.

"They had to go outside their comfort zone, because the project was an interdisciplinary topic," she said. "Before this, they were only focusing on electrical engineering, and this was more related to neuroscience. The literature that they studied is high-level papers written by scientists, Ph.D. students. I know it was really difficult for them to understand, and I was impressed by the progress they made."

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Gonzalez is a two-time Summer Scholar in the NSPAIR Lab who has been mentored by Khoubrouy since his sophomore year. The first project he worked on involved training AI software to interpret brain waves and predict if the subject was responding to an audio or visual stimulus.

The team next increased the complexity, presenting the subject only with a visual stimulus and trying to determine if it was a food or non-food image.

"I've been able to see how the projects have grown from their simplest form to now moving to controlling a robotic arm, which has been cool," Gonzalez said.

The robotic arm features four joints and a gripper. This school year, the objective is to exert basic control - which joint to move and in what direction. In future years, Khoubrouy hopes to reduce the processing time to make it as close to instantaneous as possible.

The ultimate goal of the multiyear project is to help people with paralysis to move prosthetic limbs or other devices using only their thoughts.

"I know some labs have been working on it," Khoubrouy said. "They have been very successful, but the goal is to make it more natural and faster and easier."

All three of the lab students are from the local area (though Villa-Hernandez was born in Ithaca, N.Y., where his father worked for Cornell University), and all three have caught the research bug to the extent that they intend to pursue a master's or even doctorate in engineering.

"It's really nice to be given the opportunity to partake in undergrad research," Gonzalez said. "That pushed me to want to go to graduate school."

For now, however, there are experiments to design, subjects to recruit - and a robotic arm to move.

"It's fun, it's interesting," Villa-Hernandez said of the project. "It's learning new things that you've never seen before."

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