California: Scientists have developed a new device that will allow paralyzed patients, who cannot speak, to analyze their brain waves and immediately translate them into sentences on a computer screen.
This mind reading machine is capable of tracking the activity of the mind. Experts say that the device will restore the ability to communicate to people who cannot speak or write due to paralysis.
A similar system was presented in earlier research capable of decoding up to 50 words. The machine had a limited vocabulary and the user, who was a paraplegic, had to speak words out loud which required more effort.
So Edward Cheng of the University of California and his colleagues designed a machine capable of converting the brain's activity into letters that make up a complete sentence.
After building the machine, the researchers used it on patients with severe paralysis who had difficulty speaking.
The authors applied the thinking from previous research to a more extensive vocabulary by designing this system to decode the association of brain activity with letter sounds.
In the tests, volunteers silently made sentences from a vocabulary of 1,152 words by sounding out letters, with an average error rate of 6.13 percent.
Details about the new device were published in the journal Nature Communications.