Researches have found a way by which you can turn your thoughts into tweets without using your hands to type. The scientists at University of Wisconsin’s Neural Interfaces lab have developed a Brain Twitter Interface which can be used to post a status update on the social networking website Twitter—just by thinking about it.
This is meant to act as a communication system for users whose bodies do not work, but whose brains function normally. Among those are people who have ALS, brain-stem stroke or high spinal cord injury.
Early on the afternoon of April 1, Adam Wilson posted a message to Twitter. But instead of using his hands to type, the University of Wisconsin biomedical engineer used his brain. “USING EEG TO SEND TWEET,” he thought. And this became the first tweet ever sent just by thoughts.
This Brain Twitter interface uses EEG to pick up the brainwaves. When the letter, the user wants to spell, is in the flashed row or column the user recognizes his letter and produces a brainwave that is picked up by the software. The combination of one row and one column will leave one option, the right letter. Unfortunately it still takes a lot of time to type a message, but people are able to do up to ten characters per minute with the right training.
Tweets are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other Twitter users who have signed up to receive them. So, the disabled person could simply tell family and friends how they’re feeling today just like a normal person. This sort of communication and social networking was never possible for these patients in a vegetable state. That would really be an enabling type of communication means for those people and it would make them feel, in the online world, that they’re not that much different from everybody else.
