Projects
This year's teams and everything we've built before.
2026–27 projects
Teams form after fall bootcamps. Each one works toward presenting at theCalifornia Neurotechnology Conference and publishing its code on GitHub.
BCI projects
sEMG-based third arm
Reconstructing the full 3D pose of the hand from forearm EMG, then using it to control an extra robotic limb, not just a prosthetic.
sEMG-controlled soft exosuit
A low-cost, fabric-based glove that helps move the fingers and wrist for rehabilitation, triggered by muscle signals from the forearm.
Workload-adaptive control interface
An interface that reads your mental workload from EEG and takes over some of the work when you're overloaded.
Research projects
Brain signals or artifacts?
Checking whether low-cost EEG systems are really decoding the brain, or picking up eye movements, facial muscles and head motion instead.
Do brain-like learning rules make brain-like vision models?
Training vision networks with backprop and with biologically plausible learning rules, then comparing each one to human EEG responses to the same images.
Join through fall bootcamps
Weeks 3 and 4. No experience needed.
- Intro sessions
- Two sessions with demos and code.
- EEG
- Build a simple game with an EEG headband.
- EMG
- Turn muscle signals into commands.
- Machine learning
- Lectures on deep, self-supervised and reinforcement learning.
- Hardware
- The sensors and electronics we build with.
Past projects
2025–26
EMG ASL translator
A wearable EMG band that recognizes hand gestures and speaks the matching phrase out loud, built as an affordable tool for classrooms and accessibility programs.
EEG + EMG wheelchair
A motorized wheelchair driven by muscle signals, with EEG confirming the rider actually means to move before any command goes through.
EMG piano
Play notes and chords with muscle signals instead of key presses, for people with limited finger mobility.
EMG prosthetic hand
A 3D-printed prosthetic hand controlled by forearm EMG. It recognizes gestures with 97% accuracy across users in 250 ms, for about $150.