
Researchers Use Brain Interface to Post to Twitter - nreece
http://newswise.com/articles/view/551395
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danteembermage
I think they should take that cellphone metaphor one step further. Modern
cellphones allow you to type a sequence of numbers and then using a basic
dictionary look-up to determine which word you intended to type. Since we're
down to nine characters now instead of 26 that's a start. Place the cursor in
the middle let the person choose one of four directions, or maybe put it in
the lower left, let them choose between up and right and put the most popular
letters in the lower left of the grid. Now we're at at most two or four moves
to typing a character. Still only recognizing on and off on the EEG. If we,
through practice, can train the computer to recognize two different EEG
states, now the patients can think "up, up, right" we'd start really cooking.
And ultimately if it could recognize ten states, then the brain-locked could
probably type a character a second, which would not be bad at all. At that
point you're fast enough to chat and no-one would know the difference.

I guess what I'm saying is maybe an open source project doing character
classification using an off the shelf EEG system might not be a bad idea.

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rudyfink
This article really brought home that adding "Twitter" to a project gets
headlines.

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patio11
_I’ve seen people do up to eight characters per minute_

17.5 minutes per tweet. Yikes. Hopefully they can improve that with UI tricks
-- prioritize the letters, choose a letter group and then a letter (much
faster than choosing a letter if you have to go through options sequentially),
predict based on what was previously typed, use a dictionary and allow
autoexpansion, etc.

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javanix
Interesting - I wonder what the limiting factor is for speed? It sounds like
there is a bit of a technique to typing with the system, but I wonder if there
couldn't be a faster way to filter the signal coming off the EEG.

