Successfully letting animals hit the keyboard with brain signals and letting them type in letters, to a way that people who can not move limbs can communicate

BySteve Petrucelli

Using electrodes implanted in the brainA woman who freely manipulates the robot arm with "just thinking" and skips the stealth fighter plane F-35Has appeared, but technologies capable of typing words with "just thinking" newly developed and improved by researchers at Stanford University have been developed. In the study, the monkey succeeded in typing just thinking of a passage of Hamlet.

Technology For Typing With Brain Signals Could Allow Paralyzed People To Communicate | Scope Blog
http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2016/09/12/technology-for-typing-with-brain-signals-could-allow-paralyzed-people-to-communicate/

Brain-sensing technology developed by Stanford scientists permit typing at a rate of 12 words per minute
http://news.stanford.edu/press/view/9839

"Study typing based on brain signals" is a study by Stanford UniversityKrishna ShenoyWith doctorPaul NuyujukianA doctoral researcher has adopted a method of embedding a multi-electrode array directly in the brain and reading the signal of the part of the brain that is used to move the hands and arms.

The two people tested in the past for human subjects, but typing speed was slow and the typing result was incorrectly ended. Therefore, doctors and others improved algorithms for converting brain signals to typing. After that, when I tested to write the sentences of the New York Times and Hamlet using a monkey who was trained to type the same letters as those displayed on the screen, the monkey was "just thinking" and once went It seems that typing could be done more accurately and faster than the test which made human subjects. According to the improvement of the algorithm, the typing speed has increased about three times compared with the initial test for monkeys.

You can see how to convert monkey brain signals to typing in the following movies.

Stanford researchers development technology that allows typing based on brain signals - YouTube


Alphabets are lined up on the screen, only the arrow on the upper left is green.


When bringing a gray ball to the green arrow key, the color of the key changes to light blue.


When you press the key correctly, the success rate is displayed as "100%".


However, when the key of "O" is green ... ...


I will touch the yellow key next to "O".


In this way, the success rate decreases due to incorrect answers.


If you press the correct key, the success rate will be up again ... and so on, typing will be done directly through the chip embedded in the brain.


When typing the key, a string appeared under the keyboard.


A monkey has succeeded in typing a passage of Hamlet by saying "To be or not to.. That is the question. (Whether to live or die, it is a problem)."


This technology is seen as a possibility that people who can not move hands and feet in the future may help to express the words. On the other hand, although we succeeded in typing 12 words per minute in the animal test, when it is practical for human beings, it is necessary to think "what to say", the speed of typing slows down is.