A team at Stony Brook University announced on April 10 that it has received a $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Mental Health to develop “SeeMe,” a new system aimed at detecting consciousness in patients with brain injuries.
The initiative seeks to address the challenge that many brain-injured patients labeled as “unresponsive” may actually be conscious but unable to communicate. The project aims to improve diagnosis and recovery strategies for these individuals.
Sima Mofakham, Lead Principal Investigator and Associate Professor at Stony Brook University, said, “It’s this disconnect, called cognitive motor dissociation, that we are hoping to solve with SeeMe.” Co-Principal Investigator Chuck Mikell added, “Cognitive motor dissociation is one of the most urgent diagnostic blind spots in neurology and critical care.”
The SeeMe system will use electrophysiological signals, computer vision, hand sensors, and artificial intelligence technology to detect subtle responses in brain injury patients. Researchers plan first to validate SeeMe as a monitoring tool capable of identifying responses to spoken commands. In the second phase, they will test whether SeeMe can guide treatment by detecting voluntary behavior in real time and using it for targeted therapies such as vagus nerve stimulation.
The team plans to test SeeMe on 80 traumatic brain injury patients before designing a closed-loop simulation system for consciousness recovery. The newly awarded grant (R61MH138612) will fund research through April 2031 across two phases; continued funding depends on meeting initial milestones.
Petar M. Djurić also serves as Co-Principal Investigator on the project. Previous work on SeeMe was published in Nature Communications Medicine in 2025.
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