Wheelchair Controlled by Thought

macduffman writes "New Scientist reports on another development in interfacing with the central nervous system. The system 'eavesdrops' on signals sent from the brain to the larynx, so even people who lack the muscular control to vocalize a command can operate it. The potential applications of this technology are as varied as human imagination, among them: allowing a person who has lost speech capability to vocalize again." From the article:"The wheelchair could help people with spinal injuries, or neurological problems like cerebral palsy or motor neurone disease, operate computers and other equipment despite serious problems with muscle control. The system will work providing a person can still control their larynx, or 'voice box,' which may be the case even if the lack the muscle coordination necessary to produce coherent speech."

You must think... in Russian.

[Tackhead]

> prototype [guntonfamily.com]

That's the 1966 version. Obsolete. Get the 1982 [slashdot.org] upgrade.

("This is very important, Mister Gant. You must think in Russian -- you can't think in English and transpose it...")

The tech described in the article is surprisingly like the movie [wikipedia.org], right down to Clint Eastwood's subvocalizing the commands in his head after attempting (and failing) to fire the rearward missile in English, and only succeeding when he subvocalized the command while thinking in Russian.

Need some community help please

[Anonymous Coward]

On the topic of thought-controlled devices, I've just received a prototype of a device which actually does send out the brainwave signals to the CPU. The drawback is that it only runs under Windows.

What I'm wondering is whether there are any completely Open Source (preferrably GPL based) projects out there which provide an application-layer API? I can handle reverse engineering the driver. The question is what to do with the data once it's passed up to user space, and made available for applications.

Does any body know of any good open source projects along these lines? Any help would be appreciated. I'd really like to be able to at least move the mouse pointer just back thought for starters. And then be able to type via thinking too.

Any help would be appreciated. And thanks in advance!

Re:What about the mouth?

[Cassius Corodes]

Not to be rude, but how is this insightful? The throat and mouth follow the commands of the brain, therefore unless they have independent intelligence they would not add any additional information.

Audeo

[SparhawkA]

For another cool demo of the Audeo and how it was developed, you can watch a 5-minute video here:
http://www.ni.com/niweek/keynote_videos.htm [ni.com]

It's under "Tuesday" -- the last topic titled "Algorithm Engineering, Michael Callahan, Thomas Coleman"

Enjoy!

Re:I'm down to help the disabled....

[Anonymous Coward]

Well we don't know the bandwidth or latency yet. But anything higher than about 1 kbps with less than 1 ms latency is going to make me own your ass in a deathmatch.

This makes me wonder, since we as humans (and cyborgs) are now able to access the nervous system data bus, shouldn't we cut out the old slow data bus and rewire it with fiber? And when do we get a processor upgrade? I for one would at least like a decent FPU. And a built in music system. Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to have a wifi connection (unless someone decides to hack into you).

Re:It's fo real

[greg_barton]

How long until the NSA makes us all wear one?

For a short time in college I was on a research team looking into this kind of stuff. (Way back in '93, this was) The electrical impulses that are meant for your vocal chords, but are suppressed because you don't want to (or can't) speak are called "covert oral behavior." Anyway, even back then, we were working on training up neural networks to translate the signals into words/phonemes. I'm sure the technology has come a long way since then.

Right around 9/11 and the whole Gitmo thing I started thinking, "I'll bet covert oral behavior detection is being used to interrogate prisoners." The thing is, the signals "leak" down your nerves when you only think words, but don't say them. The trick is being able to interpret them and translate them to words. Not easy by any stretch, but once successful it would be the closest thing to ESP around.