This huge advance in brain-computer-interface (BCI) has allowed a fully paralyzed man to write down his thoughts using only his mind.
These researchers at Stanford discovered brain signals that are linked to handwriting, and went about creating an interface that the paralyzed patient could interact with.
By imagining he was holding a pen and paper, the patient was then able to write complete sentences.
It’s astounding to think of the implications, as these techniques advance and allow for full brain-computer interaction.
“Here we developed an intracortical BCI that decodes attempted handwriting movements from neural activity in the motor cortex and translates it to text in real time, using a recurrent neural network decoding approach. With this BCI, our study participant, whose hand was paralysed from spinal cord injury, achieved typing speeds of 90 characters per minute with 94.1% raw accuracy online, and greater than 99% accuracy offline with a general-purpose autocorrect.”
Doctors Jaimie Henderson and Krishna Shenoy of the study, who have been working to develop BCIs since 2005, and team members Francis R. Willett, Donald T. Avansino, Leigh R. Hochberg are very pleased with the results thus far.
This approach allowed a person with paralysis to compose sentences at speeds nearly comparable to those of able-bodied adults of the same age typing on a smartphone,…The goal is to restore the ability to communicate by text.
