Research Lets You Type Words By Thought Alone

An anonymous reader writes "How about typing on a computer just by thinking about it? The downside is you have to wear a skull cap with electrodes that capture your brain waves like an EEG machine. According to this EE Times story, a team of researchers from Belgium and the Netherlands has presented Mind Speller, a thought-to-text device intended to help people with movement disabilities. The system does rely on a lot of processing on a remote computer, but it is a wireless system. And these thought-to-computer systems have wider applicability than medical support. One of the research groups involved in this development has already looked at wireless electroencephalography (EEG) to enable measures of emotion to be fed back into computer games."

Interesting.

[clone53421]

The last article that was posted [slashdot.org] was only about typing individual letters, and of course people were quick to say how useless that was: slow and impractical.

And of course the researchers thought so too, which was fine because the technology isn’t done yet.

Cool tech

[Anarki2004]

I really think this is an amazing bit of technology, I'm just afraid of what it could potentially be turned into. This is not something I would want law enforcement to start practicing. OTOH, it seems to have the potential to help a great deal of people too, so guess you have to take the good with the bad.

Multilingual

[Wowsers]

You better not be multilingual, you get stuck on a word in one language, and your thoughts on "oh damn, what's that word, sounds like whatever" gets put into your document as you're trying to remember the damn word you wanted.

I not so sure about this...

[Locke2005]

Wouldn't this work a lot like the canine speech synthesizers in "Up", except instead of suddenly going "Squirrel!", it goes "Tits!" all the time?

Re:Interesting.

[captaindomon]

People won't think it is slow and impractical if they have suffered total paralysis for some reason, and this is their first chance to communicate with the outside world and loved ones. Sure, I'm not going to use it for replacing my keyboard any time soon, but this technology in the right setting will seem so incredibly miraculous it will change people's lives.

Re:Interesting.

[ircmaxell]

That could get VERY dangerous... Just imagine if you thought something along the lines of "I'd love to just ram it in her ass". Just remember, it's all fun and games until someone gets a prolapsed rectum...

Re:One thing this story has made me realise...

[jpmorgan]

Or perhaps you're perfectly normal and the whole 'men can't not think about sex all the time' is misandrist bullshit.