Paralyzed Man Uses Brain Implant To Type Eight Words Per Minute (ieee.org) 40
A study published in the journal eLife describes three participants that broke new ground in the use of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) by people with paralysis. One of the participants, a 64-year-old man paralyzed by a spinal cord injury, "set a new record for speed in a 'copy typing' task," reports IEEE Spectrum. "Copying sentences like 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,' he typed at a relatively blistering rate of eight words per minute." From the report: This experimental gear is far from being ready for clinical use: To send data from their implanted brain chips, the participants wear head-mounted components with wires that connect to the computer. But Henderson's team, part of the multiuniversity BrainGate consortium, is contributing to the development of devices that can be used by people in their everyday lives, not just in the lab. "All our research is based on helping people with disabilities," Henderson tells IEEE Spectrum. Here's how the system works: The tiny implant, about the size of a baby aspirin, is inserted into the motor cortex, the part of the brain responsible for voluntary movement. The implant's array of electrodes record electrical signals from neurons that "fire" as the person thinks of making a motion like moving their right hand -- even if they're paralyzed and can't actually move it. The BrainGate decoding software interprets the signal and converts it into a command for the computer cursor. Interestingly, the system worked best when the researchers customized it for each participant. To train the decoder, each person would imagine a series of different movements (like moving their whole right arm or wiggling their left thumb) while the researchers looked at the data coming from the electrodes and tried to find the most obvious and reliable signal. Each participant ended up imagining a different movement to control the cursor. The woman with ALS imagined moving her index finger and thumb to control the cursor's left-right and up-down motions. Henderson says that after a while, she didn't have to think about moving the two digits independently. "When she became facile with this, she said it wasn't anything conscious; she felt like she was controlling a joystick," he says. The man with the spinal cord injury imagined moving his whole arm as if he were sliding a puck across a table. "Each participant settled on control modality that worked best," Henderson says. You can watch a video about the study here.
Slashdot advertising (Score:1)
Re: this is just the beginning... (Score:1)
Goals (Score:5, Funny)
Bet he could type faster if he switched to emacs.
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It would only require a few years of retraining at most, after that they'd be atleast 10% faster!
Those three were paralyzed (Score:1)
But now they can do more. I approve the research.
Son of a bitch (Score:3)
Maybe it's time for a brain implant because that son of a bitch can type faster than I can.
beter tahn i can do (Score:3)
Re:Size of a what? (Score:5, Funny)
"The tiny implant, about the size of a baby aspirin"
Is 'baby aspirin' supposed to be a unit of measure we are all familiar with? WTF is that even?
That would be 1.7 × 10-17 football fields, or 6.8 x 10-175 libraries of congress.
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That would be 1.7 Ã-- 10-17 football fields
American or soccer?
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That would be 1.7 Ã-- 10-17 football fields
American or soccer?
American, obviously. They don't measure things in "football fields" in Europe or anywhere else in the world. When people say "mile" we don't ask if British or Roman.
Yep. If it was soccer it would be measured in "pitches". However,to further complicate things there is also an "American" pitch, which is roughly 21/125 of a "European" pitch
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Ofc. we say "soccer fields", and some people might mistranslate into english and say "football fields", however it is only used in cases where laymen are addressed, e.g. "the flight deck of a carrier has the size of a soccer field" (which is wrong, but never mind ;D )
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"The tiny implant, about the size of a baby aspirin"
Is 'baby aspirin' supposed to be a unit of measure we are all familiar with? WTF is that even?
Baby aspirin [amazon.com] is typically sold at a dose of 81mg per tablet. Converted to nanoseconds at the speed of light it's 8.1e-5 mm, or 72 trillionths of a furlong.
Re:Post the 8 words Slashdot! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I doubt it. These people aren't necessarily suicidal, and often have perfect eyesight and hearing, but no motor control. This man just got hope for the first time since whatever happened to him, leaving him in this state.
This is a truly beautiful, and humane use for computing. Please don't be so negative, this is an outstanding achievement, on a par with the fact that ancient humans would pre-chew food for members of the tribe with no teeth. It shows we naturally care about each other, and support each other.