by A 300 -pound brain shaft machine that reads a person’s thoughts can enable communication using the power of imagination.
Patients with motone -neuron disease (MND) and other degenerative diseases cannot be able to communicate because they cannot move part of their body, including their eyes.
It is currently impossible for these “blocked” people to send messages to other people.
Dr. Amin al-Habaiibeh, professor of intelligent engineering systems at Nottingham Trent University, began to examine the problem after his brother-in-law Naeem Radwan was diagnosed with MND and was only awarded for six months to life. He died at the age of 38.
Earlier attempts to communicate with thoughts alone have tried to decipher the complex patterns and instructions, so that Prof al-Habaiiiß followed a different approach and tried to use the power of imagination.
The types of brain waves, which were created with an elephant when thinking about the conviction in a room, differ extremely from those who were made when thinking about the occurrence of football.
A 2023 study used these examples and simple mathematics, presented itself before going on a sandy beach and a lazy egg and found that the technology worked. Each imagination means a certain answer as yes or no and enables easy communication.
The technology uses EEG sensors (electroencephalogram) that are held to the head of a person to determine the five things about whom one person thinks with an accuracy between 80 and 100 percent. The lower limit of reliability increases to 87.5 percent for four options and for three or two.
Healthy people tested the technology, with the brain waves being processed using an artificial intelligence platform.
Now Prof. al-Habaiibeh has created a cheaper and simpler prototype with cheap components that are available from the shelf, although the total costs are only 300 GBP.
The Proof-of-Concept was trained to two different answers, the elephant and football to mean yes and no, and only uses three electrodes that are placed on the scalp.
Prof. al-Habaiibeh called the device Rad1. It stands for Responsive Assisted Dialogue (Rad) – the 1 should describe the first demonstration of the technology.
“Rad1 is very similar to the family name of my brother -in -law [Radwan]A memory of the person who inspired the work, ”said Prof. al-Habaibeh.
He believes that it is the only brain reading of Brainwave reading that was made with off-the-shelf components that have ever been produced and now hopes to improve the prototype to include a total of five different thoughts.
“What we did in the prototype as a demonstrator of the technology is that the person selects yes or no from two imagination,” he told the telegraph. “The idea is, if the supervisor asks the patient the question, are you pain? Then it becomes yes or no. Are you thirsty Yes or no. So this becomes a simple form of communication.
“We tried to create ideas that could enable us to predict the unique message that they want to say.
“If we have five performances, we can control a mouse: left, right, up and down and click, so the person can, for example, use software.
“The idea is that we want to minimize the number of sensors and to develop our own system as very low costs so that it can be affordable for charity organizations and hospices and people in their own home.”
The scientists now examine which combination of more than 20 ideas is most effective. This includes thinking of a red apple, the tasting of a spoon of salt, eating a chilli, singing a song, kicking glass on the beach and dancing.
The technology should be easy, cheap and easy to use and could help anyone with serious restrictions on movement that result from brain damage, mnd or accidents.
Prof. al-Habaiibeh would like to demonstrate the effectiveness of Rad1 and bring them to charity organizations and health workers as soon as possible to help patients lose their ability to communicate.
Sharmila Majumdar, a doctoral student who worked on the project at Nottingham Trent, said: “This technology has the potential to communicate dying people if they are in an incredibly vulnerable condition.
“We are proud to carry out this research to support those with MND and so that it is freely published to help others.”
