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.