Brain-computer interfaces for the disabled have been tried. There’s plenty of academic work on the topic.
For some people who are completely paralyzed the technology allows them to communicate by typing 1 character per second.
Right, I found that information at the time, but wasn’t convinced this was the best achievable performance for such individuals (let alone price-performance), considering what should be possible with consumer-grade BCIs + Dasher.
I still can’t convince myself that this is the best they can do. Personal project time?
Sure, but I don’t think EEG quality (in terms of lab vs. consumer grade) is the real bottleneck; I think it’s minimizing the amount of input that must be provided at all by exploiting the regularity of the input that will be provided. The techniques available here may have been overlooked.
I played a bit with Emotiv and find a maximum of one character-per-second pretty believable—at least, if you stick to actual brain signals and not signals from face muscles ( and even with face muscles one character per second seems in the right ballpark).
One character is not the same as one byte of (maximally compressed) information. The whole point of programs like Dasher (and word suggestion features in general) is to take advantage of the low entropy of text data relative to its uncompressed representation. Characteristic screenshot
Were you using a static, non-adaptive, on-screen keyboard? If so, that’s why I would think connecting it to Dasher should result in a speed greater than one char per second, at least after the training period (both human training, and character-probability-distribution training).
Both speed and accuracy of brain-computer interface for typing are pretty bad. What your motivation for using it?
I was exploring it
a) as a possible alternative (and very cheap) typing mechanism for the disabled that hadn’t been tried before, and
b) because I figured I could improve on it to the point of making brain-typing competitive, or at least make BCI competitive with mouse usage.
Brain-computer interfaces for the disabled have been tried. There’s plenty of academic work on the topic. For some people who are completely paralyzed the technology allows them to communicate by typing 1 character per second.
Right, I found that information at the time, but wasn’t convinced this was the best achievable performance for such individuals (let alone price-performance), considering what should be possible with consumer-grade BCIs + Dasher.
I still can’t convince myself that this is the best they can do. Personal project time?
I think the 1 character per second speed is even done with EEGs that are much better than consumer grade equipment.
It could be possible to do better but it probably won’t be easy.
Sure, but I don’t think EEG quality (in terms of lab vs. consumer grade) is the real bottleneck; I think it’s minimizing the amount of input that must be provided at all by exploiting the regularity of the input that will be provided. The techniques available here may have been overlooked.
I played a bit with Emotiv and find a maximum of one character-per-second pretty believable—at least, if you stick to actual brain signals and not signals from face muscles ( and even with face muscles one character per second seems in the right ballpark).
One character is not the same as one byte of (maximally compressed) information. The whole point of programs like Dasher (and word suggestion features in general) is to take advantage of the low entropy of text data relative to its uncompressed representation. Characteristic screenshot
Were you using a static, non-adaptive, on-screen keyboard? If so, that’s why I would think connecting it to Dasher should result in a speed greater than one char per second, at least after the training period (both human training, and character-probability-distribution training).