Short picks:
- Device accurately guesses what number from 0-9 people are thinking of
- Technology could be used to create a telepathic typewriter
- This could one-day help handicapped people who struggle to speak
- Last year scientists developed a device to reproduce speech from brain recordings to help those with motor disease.
A device that reads people’s mind through their brain waves has been developed by scientists. It could be an easily-operated machine that links smartphones in the next 5 years, researchers say. This breakthrough discovery could help handicapped people to communicate again such as those people suffered stroke. It is used as a telepathic typewriter that notes down automatically what we are thinking.
With the technology, Researchers from the Japan’s Toyohashi University of Technology, can recognize the numbers 0 – 9 with 90% accuracy using brain waves. Participants in the study uttered the numbers and the robot guesses in real-time based on real-time readings of an EEG brain scan. This would enable EEG-activated typewriter soon.
Researchers aimed in creating Brain computer interface that recognizes utterances without voice or speech imagery. They are planning to develop a device that can be easily operated with fewer electrodes and connected to smartphones within the next 5 years.
Scientists at UC Berkley successfully managed to play back a word that a person was thinking by monitoring their brain activity. Researchers were studying how hearing words, speaking out loud and imagining words involves brain areas that overlap. The challenge is to reproduce comprehensible speech form direct brain recordings done while a person imagines a word they would like to say.
Developing an implantable device that decodes the signals that occur in the brain when we think about a word, then turn these signals into a sound file that can be reproduced by a speech device is the aim.
With electrodes placed on the surface of the language areas of the brain of awake patients, researchers monitored the pattern of electrical responses of brain cells during perceived speech. They created a computer model that could match spoken sounds to these signals. Electrical signals were directly recorded from the human language areas when a person heard words.
These electrical signals were decoded and were able to turn them into sound files that reflected what the person heard with remarkable accuracy.
The modern techniques and mathematical processing of the brain signals got us closer to the details we need to extract the signals that are relevant for reproducing speech