New brain implants turn imaginary handwritten text into typed text on the screen

Research has been going on for a long time to turn mental efforts into digital commands for computer systems, but now scientists at Stanford University have taken it to the next level by demonstrating the effectiveness of this solution. Researchers at this university have combined the software of the so-called artificial intelligence into a single system with a device that scientists themselves classify as a “brain-computer interface” – it is implanted into the brain of a person with complete paralysis of the whole body. Surprisingly, this combination of technologies has demonstrated impressive results.

The software was able to decode information received from an interface in a person’s brain, converting his thoughts into text on a computer screen. In fact, a computer reads a person’s thoughts, transforming them into a digital signal – this is a kind of “writing thoughts” using an implant and AI. Moreover, the researchers said that the person who participated in the experiment was able to write text twice as fast as if the scientists had used the previous method, developed at the same Stanford, only in 2017.

“This allowed a person with paralysis to compose sentences at a rate almost comparable to the speed at which able-bodied adults of the same age type on a smartphone,” said Jaimie Henderson, MD, professor of neurosurgery and one of the authors of this development.

According to the researchers, thanks to the brain-computer interface and advanced artificial intelligence, a person with complete paralysis was able to enter text at a speed of 18 words per minute – healthy people, for example, can type on a smartphone about 23 words per minute. This development, in theory, will give millions of people around the world the ability to communicate and live in greater comfort.

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