Using Your Brain as a Typewriter

A collaboration of investigators from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Imec and the Holst Center unveiled today the Mind Speller prototype. This instrument is an advanced, EEG(electro-encephalogram)-based device that is capable of accurately interpreting brain waves and producing representations of people's thoughts in letters, words and phrases. The mobile innovation could basically be carried anywhere, and is mainly aimed at people suffering from brain paralysis, speech or language disorders, or similar afflictions, AlphaGalileo reports.

For these individuals, communicating is a cumbersome task, which oftentimes requires the participation of other people as well. One of the greatest desires that researchers found these patients had was to be able to communicate with others on their own, without having to use translators. The new portable, easy-to-wear, intelligent textual and verbal communications prototype promises to do exactly that, its developers say. The end result is to increase the quality of life for people affected by these forms of paralysis, who have for a long time engaged in nothing but brief conversations.

Sustaining longer ones is physically and mentally exhausting, but these obstacles could soon disappear from their lives. “The Mind Speller is a generic device that can easily be adjusted to different users. Therefore, it could become a cost-efficient communication solution for people with temporal impairments for whom the existing solutions are too expensive. Moreover, the Mind Speller may help those patients that are not helped with the existing devices driven by motoric activity, as the Mind Speller is based on a different principle, using P300 EEG potentials to read people’s ‘thoughts’,” explains KUL Lab of neuro- and psychophysiology member, professor Marc Van Hulle.

“With a much simpler design, relying on a power-efficient on-chip implementation, the Mind Speller is the first step in the development of a generic, easy-to-wear, accurate and cost-efficient communication solution for people with motoric disabilities. Currently, we are adapting the electronics to work with dry electrodes making the system even more unobtrusive,” explains Imec Human++ program director, Chris Van Hoof.