Brain-computer interface establishes a direct communication pathway between the human brain and the external world by realtime decoding the brain activities accompanying our thinking process. In the past two decades, rapid progress has been made in this field, with a series of important research and application results. The article reviews the state-of-art research in three main directions, namely communication and control, function rehabilitation and enhancement, status recognition and monitoring. Finally, opportunities and challenges for future development are discussed.

brain-computer interface  /  neuroimaging technique  /  neural signal processing