NASA develops 'mind-reading' system

A computer program which can read words before they are spoken by
analysing nerve signals in our mouths and throats, has been developed
by NASA.

Preliminary results show the button-sized sensors, which attach under
the chin and on either side of the Adam's apple and pick up nerve
signals from the tongue, throat, and vocal cords, can indeed be used
to read minds.

"Biological signals arise when reading or speaking to oneself with or
without actual lip or facial movement," says Chuck Jorgensen, a
neuroengineer at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field,
California, in charge of the research.

The sensors have already been used to do simple web searches and may
one day help space-walking astronauts and people who cannot talk
communicate. The sensors could send commands to rovers on other
planets, help injured astronauts control machines, or aid the
handicapped.

In everyday life, they could even be used to communicate on the sly -
people could use them on crowded buses without being overheard, say
the NASA scientists.


Web search


For the first test of the sensors, scientists trained the software
program to recognise six words - including "go", "left" and "right" -
and 10 numbers. Participants hooked up to the sensors thought the
words to themselves and the software correctly picked up the signals
92 per cent of the time.

Then researchers put the letters of the alphabet into a matrix with
each column and row labelled with a single-digit number. In that way,
each letter was represented by a unique pair of number co-ordinates.
These were used to silently spell "NASA" into a web search engine
using the mind-reading program.

"This proved we could browse the web without touching a keyboard,"
says Jorgensen.


Noisy settings


Phil Green, a computer scientist focusing on speech and hearing at
the University of Sheffield, UK, called the research "interesting and
novel" on hearing the news. "If you're not actually speaking but just
thinking about speaking then at least some of the messages still get
sent from the brain to the vocal tract," he says.

But he cautions the preliminary tests may have been successful
because of the short lengths of the words and suggests the test be
repeated on many different people to test the sensors work on
everyone.

The initial success "doesn't mean it will scale up", he told New
Scientist. "Small-vocabulary, isolated word recognition is a quite
different problem than conversational speech, not just in scale but
in kind."

He says conventional voice-recognition technology is more powerful
than the apparent results of these sensors, and that "the obvious
thing is to couple this with acoustics" to enhance communication in
noisy settings.

The NASA team is now working on sensors that will detect signals
through clothing.


Maggie McKee

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994795