9 ms·
BCI lets completely “locked-in” man communicate
- sudden_dystopia 5y ago“…and for his caretakers to play his favorite band, Tool, very loud. But it's the communications with his young son that tug at the heartstrings…” I dunno, the request for Tool, very loud gets me a little misty eyed.
- jstanley 5y agoArticle doesn't answer the important question: did he get his beer?
- uniqueuid 5y agoI assume he is supplied with nutrients via a tube and cannot swallow, so probably not. And even if, he would not get to taste it :(
- mulmen 5y agoThe article mentions requesting different foods. If he couldn’t taste then that would be a waste of effort. Why waste the time to ask for something you can’t experience?
- shard 5y agoMaybe he just misses the mild buzz from the alcohol.
- dqpb 5y agoThey could at least put some drops on his tongue
- ASalazarMX 5y agoI was thinking the same, a few ice cold beer drops, and they could ask him if he can taste it. Edit: seems his requests could have been conceded through his feeding tube: "The first message was a simple thanks to Birbaumer and the rest of the team. Other messages related to the man's care preferences: asking for a head massage or for more gel on his eye (which was prone to dryness) and requesting a higher head position when visitors were present. He even made suggestions for improving the performance of the spelling system. Eventually, he could make specific dietary requests for his feeding tube: soup with meat, sweet pea soup, and curry with potato. And he did request a beer and for his caretakers to play his favorite band, Tool, very loud." Unfortunately he's locked-in because of progressive muscle atrophy, so recovery isn't likely.
- glenstein 5y ago>I assume he is supplied with nutrients via a tube and cannot swallow, so probably not You can definitely still experience alcohol. There was a GQ article about Richard Norris, recipient of a face transplant, who went to the store and got himself some Wild Turkey which he ingested via a tube to his stomach. > He reaches into the brown bag, pulls out a bottle of Wild Turkey. [...] "For my throat," he says. He can’t take over-the-counter medications, he says. Too risky with his meds. There’s a backpack at his feet. He opens it, pulls out some tubing and a wide syringe, about a half-inch across, the kind you use to give medicine to horses. [...] He hooks the syringe to the tubing, lifts up his shirt. [...] He opens the Wild Turkey and starts pouring. https://www.gq.com/story/richard-norris https://www.gq.com/story/richard-norris
- uniqueuid 5y agoIt’s stories like this that really bring home how much progress we’ve made in medical research. There were immensely innovative studies in brain research all over the past 50-60 years, but this is still breathtaking.
- spicybright 5y agoIt really is. I see too often wins like this get overlooked by the general pessimism everyone seems to have about the world. But through a lot of hard work, we gave someone living in a black mirror-style horror the start of being able to communicate again. Give it 20 years and I'm sure we'll have a standard box to stick on someone's head to let them communicate reasonably well (or at least enough to order a cold beer).
- TaupeRanger 5y agoWell part of the pessimism comes from overstatements of the effects of such research, as evidenced by your comment. There is basically zero evidence that this device provides better quality of life than the systems that already existed. This is essentially a fluff piece, likely financed by the company that made the system. Real breakthroughs are few and far between, and it's been like this for decades.
- filoleg 5y ago> There is basically zero evidence that this device provides better quality of life than the systems that already existed. IMO it is less about which purpose this specific device is used for, and more about what this breakthrough has the potential to enable us to do in the future, using this tech as the basis to build on top of (assuming it is proven a success and all the kinks are worked out). If there was a standardized "smart hat" that I could put on my head that would allow me to control my AR glasses in an efficient way, that would be crazy. Because right now, that's one specific concern regarding AR usability, since current solutions with buttons and touch surfaces and voice controls and making hand gestures are awkwardly inconvenient and feel clunky. UI/UX paradigm for certain consumer device categories completely shifts. A lot of accessibility problems get resolved. Hardware itself on a lot of consumer devices can become much simpler and more robust, since there is no need for much hand-driven interaction. And that's just a singular the most obvious example I could've thought of. There are plenty of potential amazing things that could be enabled by this tech, even if the specific use case for it that was presented in the article might not "provide better quality of life".
- sydthrowaway 5y agoPerhaps there is hope for BCI. I always thought the signals was just noise.
- emteycz 5y agoWe've been able to turn brain signals into words for at least a decade, if not more. The only problem is the skull. It was verified on epilepsy patients (who needed to have their skull open) way back.
- burnished 5y agoCan you cite that one? I'm surprised, I had heard about recognizable linguistic activity (evidently you can see your brain working extra hard when it has to re-interpret a sentence you've already started due to additional context), but nothing like recognizable words.
- emteycz 5y ago2010: In an early step toward letting severely paralyzed people speak with their thoughts, researchers translated brain signals into words using two grids of 16 microelectrodes implanted beneath the skull but atop the brain. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100907071249.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100907071249.h... 2014: https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/07/09/172124/a-speech-synthesizer-direct-to-the-brain/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/07/09/172124/a-speech-...
- bogwog 5y agoThere's got to be some AI magic that can make sense of it. It'd at least be cooler than seeing a teddy bear riding a skateboard in times square.
- sodality2 5y agoI feel like you're understating the awesomeness of a teddy bear riding a skateboard in times square, though.
- rich_sasha 5y agoIf you have to laboriously spell each word letter by letter, German is a very unfortunate language to use.
- uniqueuid 5y agoNot a specialist, but the complex grammar of German tends to carry more information than English, which draws on a much larger vocabulary but flattened a formerly complex grammar into more words to say the same.
- simulate-me 5y agoGerman is famous for its compound nouns. My feeling is compound nouns are noticed by English speakers due to their explicit verbosity, but I don't have any data to back that up.
- emteycz 5y agoIt's just like any other language, except without spaces. Czech language can do exactly the same, but we usually use the space - looks nicer. For example, the longest Czech word: Nejnezdevětadevadesáteroznásobovávatelnějšími = [do something] by those most not multipliable by 99.
- simulate-me 5y agoMy impression when studying German is that the German language has more compound words that are singular words in English. e.g. Armbanduhr (watch), Aussehen (appearance), Hauptstadt (capital), Staubsauger (vacuum), anything ending with Zeug, etc. That doesn't necessarily mean German is longer on average.
- gnud 5y agoAn Armbanduhr is a wrist watch, not just a watch. I'm sure the Germans often shorten to it 'uhr', just like the English do. Capital is short for capital city. Vacuum is also short for vacuum cleaner. I'll grant you Aussehen - that's a single word in english. But longer than the German one.
- mulmen 5y agoI’d like to know more about the input UX. Does it do any prediction? Is it a variant of T9? Touch screens are also low fidelity input devices. The lessons learned on streamlining BCI inputs could have wider applications. Like building a web app over dialup.
- jffry 5y agoThere are two videos linked from the "supplementary information" section of the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28859-8#Sec14 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28859-8#Sec14 In particular, the second video shows sessions where he is spelling out words with the audio-interactive system
- markus_zhang 5y agoThis is sort of thing we should focus on.
- CyberDildonics 5y ago
- markus_zhang 5y agoGetting a relevant job I guess? I work in data domain so I'm thinking about working for say medical team to solve their data pipeline issues. However it requires 1) I get a deeper understanding of data engineering, which I just moved in since last job and have about one year of experience, and 2) TBF a job in such a team, which is definitely more difficult than getting one in say gaming or ads domain.
- roughly 5y agoOne thing I’d suggest is to not underestimate the value of your current skill set or your ability to contribute to this kind of work - it’s easy when you work at a tech company around a bunch of other techies and big systems to see how much more you have to learn, but odds are if you’ve been in the industry for even a couple years, you’ve got an enormous amount of experience relevant to any organization trying to wrangle computers.
- markus_zhang 5y agoThanks. I think it's a bit special about the labs. They either hire someone from inside who has a bent for big data or someone who knows everything from outside because they can't afford a whole team. So it's kinda difficult to find something that fits.
- matthoiland 5y agoAt some point in each of our lives, we'll be dependent on the empathy of another to keep us alive and comfortable. Designing and discovering technology now will help us all then, and help others that are suffering right now.
- sam1r 5y agoDoes anyone know the speed/ rate at which the German patient would communicate words or sentences?
- rbultje 5y ago"On average, 121 min were spent spelling and the average length of these communications was 131 characters per day. The patient’s intelligible messages comprised 5747 characters produced over 5338 min, corresponding to an average rate of 1.08 characters per minute."
- Wojakmeme 5y agoI wonder if this is caused by the mans mental state or the technical limitations.
- Hanschri 5y agoIf you watch about 20 seconds of the linked video, it shows the system as a screenshot and in practice for a few seconds. [0] I would postulate that the loop starts by selecting the yellow block and waiting for him to select or reject it. If he selects it, he is able to cycle through the letters from left to right, ending at the symbol all the way to the right on every layer to exit that block. Then it keeps cycling down until he selects a new colored block. You can see this in practice if you rewatch the bit where he asks his son if he wants to watch a movie with him. The article also notes that the man gave feedback to improve the system, so I would guess that it's a mix between a limitation of the way this system is set up, how fast the system can accurately distinguish a yes from a no, and how fast he is able to keep up, and for how long. It would be interesting to see this system be implemented in a better way, I'm sure you could speed this up by dynamically changing the letter layout or even suggesting words on the fly, in the same way spelling suggestions work on other devices. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et22mZ_Ovo0&t=199s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et22mZ_Ovo0&t=199s
- jffry 5y agoThe second video accompanying the actual paper should give a good sense. It's not the fastest but it's still incredible: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28859-8#Sec14 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28859-8#Sec14
- lqr 5y agoIn another life I would love to be a BCI researcher.
- the_only_law 5y agoIn another life I’d just try and do it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- paulpauper 5y agohmm...what if you accidently divulge your crypto seed phrase
- not-my-account 5y agoAh yes I'd much rather remain locked-in than divulge my precious seed phrase /s
- spicybright 5y agoIt's the only counter to rubber hose decryption!
- teaearlgraycold 5y ago
- charcircuit 5y agoHow? It would take forever to type out and most people don't even have it memorized.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- MBCook 5y agoWasn’t communicating with locked-in people a big “breakthrough” in the 80s or 90s that sadly later ended up being debunked as basically wishful thinking? Unfortunately it seems like this kind of thing pops up every 5-10 years so I’ve become quite skeptical of it.
- uniqueuid 5y agoWell, here's the paper in nature communications: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28859-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28859-8 One might worry that a good enough heuristic (i.e. word completion) will generate sensible sentences even from noise input. However, in this case, he is typing his son's name.
- MBCook 5y agoI remember hearing similar things. The difference here may be that I think in many of the cases I’m thinking about it might not have been locked-in so much as people thought to be in comas or with other serious damage he where the truth is they probably weren’t capable at all. That doesn’t seem to be the case here. He seems to lack the physical ability to communicate but I’m not sure there is a reason he would lack the mental ability.
- 9oliYQjP 5y agoDoes it say if the researchers knew his family members' names in advance? Wouldn't the "a ha!" moment be when the patient shares something that the researchers couldn't possibly find out on their own and that wouldn't be interpreted via his family's help? None of that appeared to happen here. Having said that, I've just skimmed the Nature article. But what stands out is that they had 86 days of unsuccessful communication before they changed strategies and then all of a sudden started reporting success. I really hope this works but we should remain skeptical for the possibility of abuse here. Other commenters in this thread have reported that the researchers have committed misconduct in their brain research. The only thing I fear more than being in the discussed patient's situation is being in their situation and having my thoughts incorrectly interpreted at best or outright manipulated at worst.
- andrei52 5y ago
- caca3 5y ago
- caca3 5y ago
- petethedog 5y agoThis may work or may not. But the two researchers seemed not to be that honest in the past. [0] They probably try to restate authority... [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02862-4/ https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02862-4/
- sizzle 5y agoWow this is terrible, I hope this technology isn’t affected by his lack of morals for locked in patients’ sake.
- evandale 5y agoI always flip between space travel and medical science as being our greatest achievement. For me, the covid vaccines and this story give medical science the lead.
- implying 5y agoIsn't it sad that he has to type out his only messages to the world letter by letter, and he spends his time typing out the names of mega-brands? "...‘(son’s name) moechtest du mit mir disneys die hexe und der zauberer anschauen auf amazon’ – ‘would you like to watch Disney’s witch and wizard with me on amazon’ on day 461"
- seabird 5y agoHe's talking to his kid. Joe Average isn't going to tell his son that he has plans to use the BCI to transcend this mortal coil and claim the power of God. He's going to do what this guy did -- ask for a beer, to hear some of his favorite music again, and to enjoy something simple with his kid that doesn't require a lot of physical input or talking from him.
- wmichelin 5y agoThis is one of the most beautiful pieces of technology I have ever seen. This gives me hope. I can't imagine the feeling of finally being able to communicate after being trapped inside of your own body.
- sonicggg 5y agoVery curious on what is his motivation is to keep on living. There's really no hope for any meaningful improvement in quality of life. Latest research was just so disheartening, as apparently ALS is a prion-like illness. As of today we barely have a good grasp on treating viral illnesses (and even bacteria is coming to bite us back). I don't foresee any effective treatment for this type of illness in the next few decades.
- wnolens 5y agoI've sat at the bedside of my mother and grandmother, both seemingly unconscious (for different reasons) and mostly unresponsive until they passed. My grandmother would cry (tears would flow) when some family members came by and spoke about her condition in front of her. My mother would jerk her hand away from my father's when he was too fidgety with her. It would appear that they were both experiencing some form of consciousness, just trapped and likely very scared. So I took care of the swatting away of others and spoke softly to them to let them know they weren't alone. I wish they could have expressed their needs in that moment.
- masturbayeser 5y agoLife is so unfair, thank you for sharing your story
- sizzle 5y agoSorry for your loss. This was very touching and you are a good son for being there in their time of need.
- sizzle 5y agoImagine how many people were euthanized while locked in without their consent before this technology existed. Scary and I hope this technology is funded.
- adultSwim 5y agoResearchers should also offer patients the choice to die.