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THOUGHTS TURN TO TEXT WITH NEW BRAIN IMPLANT
Researchers at Stanford University’s Howard Hughes Institute of Medicine were able to write about 90 characters per minute using implants in a paralyzed person.
This week, Stanford University announced an impressive development in the field of neural implants. The University’s researchers used implants in a paralyzed person. In this way, the subject was able to write about 90 characters per minute, imagining that he was writing by hand.
Attempts to get paralyzed people through implants to express themselves by giving them the ability to write have so far only involved giving them a virtual keyboard and moving a cursor with their mind. The method was effective but slow. In addition, in order for the cursor to go to a button, the subject had to pay full attention, and he had to spend time learning how to control the system.
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THEY WILL BE ABLE TO EXPRESS THEIR THOUGHTS WITH THE IMPLANT
The researchers began looking for other possible ways to remove the fonts from the brain and move them to the page. At some point in our thought process for writing, where we form an intention to use a particular character, scientists thought that using an implant to follow that intention could potentially work.
In addition, his researchers inserted two implants into the premotor cortex of a paralyzed person. This area is thought to have been involved in the creation of the intention to carry out the movements.
After inserting the implants, the researchers asked the participant to imagine writing a letter on a page, and in doing so they also recorded the subject’s neural activity. Eventually, the participant was found to have about 200 electrodes in their pre-motor cortex, but not all of them were informative for writing letters.
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FIXED SLOWNESS OF THE SYSTEM
Researchers at Stanford University’s Howard Hughes Institute of Medicine have identified the characteristics of nerve records that differ the most when the various letters are imagined. Overall, they found they could decipher the appropriate character with an accuracy rate of just over 94%. The only obstacle was the system’s slightly slow progress. After the work was done to solve this problem, the system worked quite well at the last point.
In the end, the delay between a character appearing on the screen and thought was about half a second, and the participant could produce about 90 characters per minute. This easily surpassed the record of the implant-based writing system, which produced about 25 characters per minute, the previous record.
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IT’S NOT VIABLE, BUT IT’S PROMISING
This new system developed, as the researchers noted, is not yet fully and clinically viable. To begin with, it was only used on a single individual, so there is no data yet on how much it would work for others.
Research in the USA by Elon Musk is also working with Neuralink, in the field of neural implants, but has not yet shown how we can actually use the implants. For now, implant work is continuing with the academic community.
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