A computerized typewriter that can read minds was on display at the CeBIT high-tech fair, touted as a potential tool to help patients incapacitated by injury or disease to communicate again.
Prototypes of the "mental typewriter", developed by computer scientists from Germany's renowned Fraunhofer Institute and neurology specialists from Berlin's Charite Hospital, made their public debut at the event.
Two subjects wearing a sort of leather swimming cap covered with wires linked to a computer in front of them tested out the invention before CeBIT crowds.
Both men imagined movements that were then played out on the screen, one of the developers behind the project, Klaus-Robert Mueller of the Fraunhofer Institute, said.
Without either of the men moving a muscle, the cursor on the screen began to float, letters eventually appeared and sentences formed.
"They imagined they were putting a ball in their left hand or the right, or that they were moving a door with one of their feet or shooting a goal," Mueller explained.
Each mental movement triggered an adjustment of the cursor on the screen, and prompted the selection of letters by process of elimination.
The experience is time-consuming at several minutes per sentence. But it works.
The swimming cap is equipped with sensors that like an EEG machine permit the measurement of brain activity.
The brain's electrical signals are transmitted by wire to the computer which reads them and transform them into commands.
The doctors on the team applied their "physiological knowledge of which movement provokes which reaction in which part of the brain," while the computer scientists converted that information into algorithms, neurology professor Gabriel Curio of the Charite Hospital explained.
The developers said they did not believe patients would need much training to learn to use the system.
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