Our topic is...Human-Computer Interfaces!

Telepathic rats...tweeting from your mind...playing music based on your mood...all these things are possible thanks to human-computer interfaces (or in the case of the rats, rat-computer interfaces!). The way this technology works by harnessing the signals your body emits, turning these into data. It comes from the health industry, where it's been used for over 20 years to diagnose brain and heart conditions.

But now, smart people and smart companies are realising that this data can be repurposed for other, exciting business purposes. The three main trends we are seeing include the analyses of this data for market research purposes, the use of this data to control applications and the use of this data to enhance communications.

From a market research point of view, it's all about predictive analysis. What companies want to do, and what some are doing, is looking at what people do when they are thinking and feeling a certain way. For example, when I am sad, I want to eat indian food and watch sci-fi movies. So, if a company know that, and they know I am sad, they can send me marketing messages about indian restaurants and sci fi movies. It's like behavioural targeting 3.0 (since we are still on 2.0, right?).

From an applications point of view, a plethora of gadgets have flooded the market over the last year as the technology has become cheaper and more affordable. These include things like mechanical tails that wag with your mood and games that you control with your mind (like blowing up zombies heads). There has also been a headset just launched that plays music based on your mood. No more sifting through your library to find "Killing in the name" by Rage Against the Machine after someone cuts you off in a queue.

And from a communications point of view, if rats can talk to each other using just their minds, why can't we? So, applications that let you tweet from your mind have been developed. And there are others that have been developed for disabled people who can't talk, with the idea being to turn their thoughts into words.

Neuroscience and the brain are at the centre of human-computer interfaces. But new breeds are popping up, most interestingly heart-computer interfaces. Some people believe the heart is the intellectual centre of the body, so it will be interesting to see how the data from our heart's differs to that of the brain and therefore what different kinds of business applications can be developed!

So, this is what we will be exploring over the next 15 sessions :-)