Thursday, April 23, 2009

Mind-Reading Device

LiveScience.com
The new mind-reading device shows letters on a screen that flash one at a time. When the user thinks of a letter, and then that letter finally flashes, brain waves send a signal to the computer that it recognizes as, "Hey, choose that letter." It is slow, but it works for crafting short messages such as tweets for Twitter (Credit: UW-Madison).
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Twitter messages are so short -- a 140-character limit -- that you have to really think about what you want to say. For Adam Wilson, thinking is all he has to do.

Earlier this month, Wilson thought of a tweet (the name for a post to the social networking site) and poof, his computer read his mind and sent the darn thing. At just 23 characters, Wilson's message, "using EEG to send tweet," was done with a computer setup that interprets brain waves.

The technology could one day help patients who otherwise can't communicate finally talk to the outside world. Among them are people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), brain-stem stroke or high spinal cord injury. More>>

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