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Fraunhofer Gesellschaft

Fraunhofer IuK-Verbund

Fraunhofer in Berlin

Here you can access the press releases of the current calendar year.

Nr. 67, 24.02.06

Writing with the Mental Typewriter

Premiere at the CeBIT 2006 Computer Fair: Fraunhofer FIRST performs live trials with its Berlin Brain-Computer Interface

A serious accident or illness may leave all a patient’s limbs paralyzed, severely restricting communication with the outside world. A brain-computer interface that translates brain signals into computer control signals could help these patients to write texts and thus communicate with their environment. At the 2006 CeBIT Computer Fair, Fraunhofer FIRST and the Berlin Charité will demonstrate how the mental typewriter can be used for this purpose.

We cordially invite you to watch the first tests being conducted with selected healthy subjects in front of a live audience:
Time:	March 9th, 11 a.m. - 13 p.m. and 14 p.m. - 17 p.m.
	March 10th, 11 a.m. - 13 p.m. and 14 p.m. - 16 p.m.
Place:	CeBIT Hannover, Hall 9, Booth A 60 (BMBF)

On the other days of the CeBIT Fair, a simulated test setup using a shop-window dummy will be on display. Films will document the experiments’ progress.

Cooperation between Fraunhofer FIRST and the Charité to develop an interface between the human brain and the computer began some years ago. The result was the socalled Berlin Brain-Computer Interface (BBCI). This uses the electrical activity of the brain in the form of an electroencephalogram (EEG). Electrodes attached to the scalp measure the brain’s electrical signals. These are then amplified and trans-mitted to the computer, which converts them into technical control signals. The principle behind the BBCI is that the activity of the brain already reflects the purely mental conception of a particular behaviour, e.g. the idea of moving a hand or foot. The BBCI recognizes the corresponding changes in brain activity and uses them, say, to choose between two alternatives: one involves imagining that the left hand is moved, the other that the right hand is moved. This enables a cursor, for example, to be moved to the left or right. The person operating the mental typewriter uses the cursor to select a letters field. The next step reduces the choice, and after a few more steps we arrive at the individual letters, which can be used to write words. This process enables simple sentences to be constructed within minutes. A first prototype of the mental typewriter is currently available. In a series of experiments, different spelling methods are tested in terms of their usability and are adapted to the BBCI. It will be some years, though, before the mental typewriter can be used in everyday applications. Further research is needed, in particular to refine the EEG sensors.

Other potential applications of the BBCI are in safety technologies (e.g. in automobiles for monitoring cognitive driver stress), in control instruments (e.g. for prostheses and wheelchairs) or in the computer games industry. How a new type of interface for computer games might look will be demonstrated at CeBIT with the game Brain Pong. This will involve two of the developers using the BBCI to play a game of teletennis in which the “rackets” are controlled by imagining movements.

The two project heads, Prof. Dr. Klaus-Robert Müller (Fraun-hofer FIRST) and Prof. Dr. Gabriel Curio (Charité), will be available for interviews.

Further information can be obtained from Fraunhofer FIRST’s press manager, Mirjam Kaplow
Tel.:	+49 (0) 30/6392-1823; -1808
E-Mail:	mirjam.kaplow@first.fraunhofer.de

Further information on the Berlin Brain-Computer Interface is available at: http://www.bbci.de. We will be glad to provide graphic material if requested.

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