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TORONTO Scientists have developed an interface that will allow people with spinal cord injuries and neurological disorders to communicate by using the brain signals associated with handwriting. Scientists have developed a brain-computer interface (BCI) to help people who are paralyzed with written communication, by tracking the brain s signals during handwriting to see how the brain differentiates between letters. The way the system works is by recording activity from about 100 up to 200 neurons, or brain cells, all simultaneously, says Jaimie Henderson, senior author of the BCI study and co-director of the Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory at Stanford University.
In a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, a participant, who is paralyzed from the neck down due to a spinal cord injury, was asked by researchers to attempt to write out lowercase letters and punctuation.
NATURE 2021/ERIKAWOODRUM
A brain-implant system trained to decode the neural signals for handwriting from a paralyzed man enabled a computer to type up to 90 characters per minute with 94 percent accuracy, researchers report yesterday (May 12) in
Nature. The study’s authors say this brain-computer interface (BCI) is a considerable improvement over other experimental devices aimed at facilitating communication for people who cannot speak or move, but many steps remain before it might be used clinically.
“There are so many aspects of [the study] that are great,” says Emily Oby, who works on BCIs at the University of Pittsburgh and was not involved in the work. “It’s a really good demonstration of human BCI that is working towards clinical viability,” and also contributes to understanding why the handwriting-based system seems to work better than BCIs based on translating the neural signals for more straightforward physical motions such as pointing at letters on a displa
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Video A combination of brain implants and a neural network helped a 65-year-old man paralyzed from the neck down type out text messages on a computer at 90 characters per minute, faster than any other known brain-machine interface.
The patient, referred to as T5 in a research paper published [preprint] in Nature on Wednesday, is the first person to test the technology, which was developed by a team of researchers led by America s Stanford University.
Two widgets were attached to the surface of T5’s brain; the devices featured hundreds of fine electrodes that penetrated about a millimetre into the patient’s gray matter. The test subject was then asked to imagine writing out 572 sentences over the course of three days. These text passages contained all the letters of the alphabet as well as punctuation marks. T5 was asked to represent spaces in between words using the greater than symbol, >.