BCI “Killer App”: The Brain-Twitter Interface

The possibilities are endless with BCI, you just need some creativity, the right material and enough relevant knowledge. NITRO Lab has got these three elements figured out and are using it to create cool applications. I already showed it in the last post, but it’s worth to show it again: The Brain-Twitter Interface. This is a very nice example of combining BCI technologies with modern communication tools. It enables users whose bodies do not work to send a tweet on twitter, but how does this killer app works?’

As you can see in the movie the application uses a 6×6 grid of all possible letters, some numbers, a white space and the submit/twit button. The rows and columns are flashed one by one, the order can be varied and adjusted by the frequency of use per letter to maximize spelling speed. Also the order of the letters in the grid could be changed, according to frequency of the letters and the language.

Like I described in my previous post it uses EEG to pick up the brainwaves. When the letter, the user wants to spell, is in the flashed row or column the user recognizes his letter and produces a P300 brainwave that is picked up by the software. The combination of one row and one column will leave one option, the right letter.

Unfortunately it still takes a lot of time to type a message, but people are able to do up to ten characters per minute with the right training. You learn it by training, just like the first time you texted on your cell phone.

This application deserved a lot of media attention and it is even in the CNN/Time’s “Best 50 Inventions of 2009″. This is one of the first examples where a BCI would be useful for a much larger community of people with neurological deficits. These people are able to send short tweets to their family and friends and can communicate more easily about the state they are in. They will feel not that much different from everybody else in the online world.