Brain Tweets

video management, video solution, video streaming

Have we arrived at the day when the disabled can communicate by Twitter? And haven’t they suffered enough?

Two questions to ponder as you check out the video above (I don’t know why it’s silent… There are subtitles, though).

The underlying technology is not all that new. EEG to help locked-in patients communicate is so well-established at this point that it even showed up in a recent episode of House. Basically, electrical activity on the scalp — controlled by thought — is translated by software into cursor movements. The cursor, then, can be used to select letters and spell out words.

It’s pretty amazing stuff. But it’s been around for more than a few years now. In particular, a system called BCI2000 (BCI = Brain-Computer Interface) is already in use in some 120 labs.

What’s particularly cool about this is taking a technology that’s had success in the lab (and with some test patients) and putting it to a truly innovative real-world use. Such as: Twitter.

Wired’s story on the new tech sums it up well:

The work is special because it meets the immediate needs of locked-in people, said Purdue University biomedical engineer Kevin Otto, who was not involved in the project.

“It’s in tune with what patients want,” said Otto. “Social networking and communication is really their first desire. There’s been quite a bit of success, and a few demonstrations, helping people to e-mail. But the same reason why people choose Twitter and Facebook over e-mail is the same reason why this is significant.”

Williams described e-mail as a a relatively difficult and inefficient task for someone on a brain-computer interface.

“It’s difficult enough to be able to spell words, much less find an address book and select names. The overhead involved in these applications is just too much,” he said. “Twitter is very serendipitous. It handles all the things that we’ve been struggling to make easy for a patient to do. It puts messages where people can find them. Let the world know how you’re doing, what you’re thinking, and they’ll find you. And that’s perfect for these patients and their families.”

This strikes me as exactly right. While using the technology to type onto a screen in the same room is an amazing breakthrough and a world of help to someone who’s locked-in, creating a way to access the wider world — one that takes advantage of the world of social networking — is just a great idea, and one that will help patients feel much more connected to a community of family and friends. While I’m not sure it’s so impossible to make an email address book that would be usable on this kind of system (usability geniuses like those at Apple could sure as hell crack that nut), it’s great to see a thousands flowers bloom.

Now, a few words on what this is not. It is not telepathy, or thinking words onto the screen, any more than sitting down at a typewriter is thinking words onto paper. It’s thinking cursor movements to “type” in a very labor-intensive way. You might notice how long it takes just to type two letters. You have to train yourself to use a system like this; and even then it’s slow.

That said, I think it’s entirely possible we’ll someday see the technology to think words onto a screen. As I looked at in this post on “mind-reading” technologies, there is already work being done using brain-scanning technology to figure out what word a person is thinking. It seems to have had a decent amount of success in differentiating between concrete nouns, like “knife” versus “barn.” It’s possible to imagine this technology advancing quite significantly in coming decades. You’d want it to be able to do a lot more than it can do now, and you’d want to do it without having to lie in an fMRI machine. But it’s still something that’s very much on the horizon.

And it’s great news for people who are currently very limited in their communication.