Ideas, Inventions And Innovations
Mindwriting: Device Enables Paralyzed People to Text by Thought
Artificial intelligence, interpreting data from a device placed at the brain’s surface, enables people who are paralyzed or have severely impaired limb movement to communicate by text. Call it “mindwriting.”
The combination of mental effort and state-of-the-art technology have allowed a man with immobilized limbs to communicate by text at speeds rivaling those achieved by his able-bodied peers texting on a smartphone.
Stanford University investigators have coupled artificial-intelligence software with a device, called a brain-computer interface, implanted in the brain of a man with full-body paralysis. The software was able to decode information from the BCI to quickly convert the man’s thoughts about handwriting into text on a computer screen.
Call it mindwriting.
The combination of mental effort and state-of-the-art technology have allowed a man with immobilized limbs to communicate by text at speeds rivaling those achieved by his able-bodied peers texting on a smartphone.
Stanford University investigators have coupled artificial-intelligence software with a device, called a brain-computer interface, implanted in the brain of a man with full-body paralysis. The software was able to decode information from the BCI to quickly convert the man s thoughts about handwriting into text on a computer screen.
The man was able to write using this approach more than twice as quickly as he could using a previous method developed by the Stanford researchers, who reported those findings in 2017 in the journal eLife.