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Steve Higgins is sometimes a Psychologist, sometimes a Neuroscientist, and sometimes even a Human Factors Engineer. He works for the U.S. Government. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in Psychology.
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Posted on: March 10, 2010 11:53 AM, by The Omnibrain
Are you ready for the future?! Is text messaging just too fast for you?! Are you ready to type a blazingly fast few words a minute after hours and hours of training?! We have the must buy device for you!
You can get the G-Tex Intendix brain- computer interface for the amazingly great value of $12,250.
Ok I jest... if you're paralyzed this might be a great device - otherwise, a huge huge huge waste of money. You can also check out a pretty cool video over @ Engadget.
Brain & Behavior
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Comments
Is more known about how it is supposed to work? Judging by the movie on Engadget, it seems like the world's most inefficient P300 BCI. It does seem like they're doing single trial classification, which is pretty impressive if it works well, but it would be a lot faster if they would light up entire rows and columns at a time (you'd need at least two classifications, but looping through all the possibilities would be much faster). I don't really see how you could get 1 character per second in this way.
If that is possible however, that would be incredibly fast for a BCI (I imagine it could rival an untrained person trying to SMS/text message). Given that there are 50 'buttons' and assuming a classification accuracy of 100% it would be possible to reach an information throughput rate of over 330 bits/min (in literature bitrates of 30 in similar systems are often touted as 'good').
What I don't understand is why you would need hours of training. The P300 response should be involuntary. The only thing that might need to train is the classification algorithm, but I don't think that should take so long.
Of course, if they're not using P300, most of this is moot. 1 character per second is impressive however, and I would like to know more about how they're getting it. It might still not be a very practical device for the average user, but if the numbers are correct it appears to be miles ahead of other systems in terms of performance.
Posted by: Jordi | March 10, 2010 12:35 PM