Typing with your brain

Here’s interesting news from the Medtech Conference (sponsored by our new parent company, Canon Communications) in Stuttgart. Imec, the Holst Centre, and the lab of neuro- and psychophysiology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven presented what they call the “Mind Speller,” which they describe as “a portable, easy-to-wear, intelligent textual and verbal communications prototype device enabling people with motoric disabilities (suffering from for example brain paralysis or speech or language disorders) to communicate.”The Mind Speller makes use of event-related potentials in the EEG signals of a person selecting characters from a display presenting alternate rows and columns of characters. The system makes use of P300 potentials, which, the organizations report, “are often used as metrics of cognitive function in decision making processes.” They note that currently available P300 devices are large, expensive, and uncomfortable, while in contrast, the Mind Speller is portable, consisting of a matchbox-sized device connected to a cap that contains electrodes that capture relevant EEG signals.

The electronics in the matchbox, developed by Imec and the Holst Centre, contains Imec and Holst Centre’s proprietary ultra-low-power 8-channel EEG chip, a commercially available low power microcontroller that digitizes the EEG signals, and a low-power 2.4-GHz radio that transmits the EEG signals wirelessly to a PC. The data is interpreted on the PC by signal-processing algorithms developed by the team of Prof. Marc Van Hulle at the lab of neuro- and psychophysiology of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven .

The Mind Speller might compete with either eye-tracking or laser-pointing technologies, which can be subject to long calibration procedures and are expensive.

“The Mind Speller is a generic device that can be easily adjusted to different users. Therefore, it could be a cost-efficient communication solution for people with temporal impairments for whom the existing solutions are too expensive. Moreover, the Mind Speller may help those patients that are not helped with the existing devices driven by motoric activity, as the Mind Speller is based on a different principle, using P300 EEG potentials to read people’s ‘thoughts,’” says Prof. Marc Van Hulle from the lab of neuro- and psychophysiology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

“With a much simpler design, relying on a power-efficient on-chip implementation, the Mind Speller is the first step in the development of a generic, easy-to-wear, accurate and cost-efficient communication solution for people with motoric disabilities,” says Chris Van Hoof, program director for the Human++ project at Imec. “Currently, we are adapting the electronics to work with dry electrodes making the system even more unobtrusive.”

Unfortunately, I’m not at Medtech. I do plan to attend Imec and Holst Centre’s annual research review meeting in June and hope to see a demonstration then.