BCI “Future App”: Brain-Voice Interface
In previous posts I already showed some BCI technology applications, the Star Wars Force Trainer and the Brain-Twitter Interface. The latter is an application that could help paralysed people to be a part of society again. How will you communicate when you can’t move your limbs, you are not able to talk and even can’t blink your eyes? Wouldn’t it be great if there is a way to simulate spoken language right out of the brain? This is a dream for Erik Ramsey, who is paralysed and is not able to speak since a stroke ten years ago. The condition he is in, is called the locked-in syndrome.
There are already methods to create a synthesized voice, with Stephan Hawking as the best example. For Ramsey, this is not a solution, the way the synthesized voice is acquired also relies on muscle movement. Fortunately methods are improving and there are some revolutionary new ways to obtain patterns out of neurons from the brain, this is what Dr. Philip Kennedy did. A very small electrode is placed inside the skull of Erik Ramsey. This electrode is wired to a computer and the patterns of Ramsey are studied for more than two years. After intense training they are able to distinguish vowels, that Ramsey wants to express. The classification of vowels is already at 75%, this is a very good rating for a system like this. Of course there are a lot of things that need to be improved, they are already experimenting with wireless control. It is still very new, but in the near future this can be fine tuned and Erik Ramsey could be able to convert his brain signals into a computer voice!
Explanation about this short movie: It consists out of two parts, Ramsey listens to the vowel sound that the computer is making (Listen), after that he tries to reacreate this vowel sound, just by thinking about it and the computer translates the brain signal into vowel sounds (Speak). He is not controlling the cursor by thinking about location, he is really thinking about speaking the vowel sounds!
