At CeBIT this year, an event that takes place in Hanover, Guger Technologies gave a practical demonstration of its technology Intendix, the first brain-machine interface for personal use.
The system consists of a sort of helmet, equipped with various electrodes, combined with a bright display that contains characters and a brain-wave amplifier, all coordinated by an application that runs on Windows. Wear a helmet and focusing on each letter of the display, the system recognizes the user’s brain waves and allows the characters to write to the PC.
The technology was developed to provide aid for the disabled, with partial or total paralysis, according to engineers Guger, after a period of training you can get to write up to 10 characters per minute. To configure your machine and make them recognize the brain waves to be associated with each letter, however, requires a learning period is not short, though, the latest updates to the software have significantly reduced this time.
However, during a practical test, a user is needed more than five minutes of concentration to write only three characters, Intendix is undoubtedly a promising technology and, although still too dependent on the human variable, deserves to be developed and marketed, because it could provide valuable assistance in the communication for all those people who are unable to use the arts and to speak.
To enter a message intendiX, the user must look at each of the letters on a virtual keyboard displayed on a screen. The software flashes each of the columns of letters until the user’s brain reacts to the flash of the column containing the chosen letter, then blinks each of the rows until it detects a response. Then “write” the letter at the intersection of row and column detected.
“It takes 40 seconds per character at first, but in the laboratory has accelerated to 0.9 seconds per character,” said Bruckner, who also confirms that it has an interface for Twitter, but the fact is that this invention is intended more for people with disabilities.
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