Brain Computer Interface in Practice
Published: Jun 20, 2007The University of Tübingen in Germany is helping patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) with a communication program that directly interfaces with the brain.
Neurobiologist Andrea Kübler works with a 49-year-old patient that has been paralyzed due to ALS. The disease has left her patient with little ability to communicate and is now only able to blink his eyes.
Communicating with only the eyes is possible via assistive technologies available at this time, but for Kübler’s patient, time could be running out. Since her patient’s paralysis might prevent him from even blinking his eyes, she’s working on an alternative way to communicate when this “locked-in syndrome” arrives.
The brain-interface called Thought Translation Device (TTD) has worked before with more locked-in patients like Hans-Peter Salzmann, a former lawyer in his forties who has the locked-in syndrome and produced his first word after the lock-in syndrome. “ABRAKADABRA” was the first word he produced at the University after over twelve months of practice.
“We know that communication is very important to maintaining quality of life,” says Kübler and that’s why he continues working on TTD devices that now allow her patients to communicate by moving a cursor on a screen using sheer brainpower. These preliminary brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) could link patients’ fully functioning brains to the outside world.
BCIs “could change the picture as to what you’re going to tell people as they get disabled,” says John Wolpaw, a neurologist at the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health in Albany in an interview with ScienceNews. “The fact that you’re paralyzed doesn’t have to mean a lousy quality of life.”
Source: The Newyorker and ScienceNews
