If you imagine writing with your brain… Text output was successful

A technology is being developed that enables things such as typing or manipulating a robotic arm by implanting it into the brain of a person with paralysis in the body. According to a study published in the journal Nature, it has succeeded in actually printing the handwriting imagined in the head on a computer screen. Therefore, it is regarded as facilitating communication among people whose limbs cannot move.

A research team at the Howard Hughes Institute of Medicine in the United States conducted an experiment with a patient whose neck was paralyzed and could not move. The research team instructed the patient to imagine holding a pen with a paper in front of him, and instructing the patient to write a letter with paper and a pen in his imagination. The patient’s brain contains implants, and when the implant writes text with imagination, it detects the activity and the algorithm decodes and outputs the activity pattern for each character.

In the experiment, 90 characters per minute were printed. In the experiment, the team inserted two implants into the patient’s motor cortex. The motor cortex is known as the cerebral cortex involved in motor execution, and it was thought that detecting intention in the motor cortex was more likely to produce a clear signal than detecting the motion itself.

Two implants had 200 electrodes installed, but not all electrodes are used to detect handwriting. However, some electrodes captured electrical signals, and the team identified signal characteristics that differ from character to character. The activity for a single letter is clustered, and it was found that letters with similar shapes such as p and b or h and n may form close clusters.

As a result, the prepared handwriting output accuracy is about 94%. In addition, in the case of free Q&A, the speed was a little lower, displaying 75 characters per minute, and the error rate increased by 2% after automatic correction, but it is said that the overall rate was within the allowable range.

It also revealed that the system developed this time is in the experimental stage and has no prototype. Since there was only one subject, it is not known how much other people will be able to use the system. On the other hand, compared to the previous implant drive system, this system has a large speed improvement and excellent precision, which can be said to make user interaction smoother. Related information can be found here.