Samsung has begun testing mind-controlled tablets and smartphones as the
next step toward freeing people from tapping on keyboards or screens. A
lot of early research into mind-control has focused on helping the disabled,
and the South Korean company's efforts will similarly likely benefit
disabled gadget users sooner than the average electronics consumer.
Early experiments have shown how people can use thoughts alone to
launch an app, find and select a contact, choose to play songs from
favorite playlists and power a tablet up or down, according to a story
in MIT Technology Review. Samsung's Emerging Technology Lab teamed up with Roozbeh Jafari, an electrical engineer at the University of Texas at Dallas, to carry out the research on a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet.
Such achievements sound less impressive when considering that users can
only carry out mind-control actions about once every five seconds, and
with an accuracy of only 80 to 95 percent. Users must wear a cap covered
with electrodes and wires running to each electrode—like an
electroencephalograph (EEG), it picks up the patterns in the brain's
electrical signals.
The Samsung approach interprets well-known brain activity patterns—ones
related to the action of seeing repeating visual patterns—as
mind-control commands. Researchers found that users can carry out
certain actions on a tablet by mentally focusing on an icon that blinked
at certain frequencies.
Similar mind-control technologies relying upon EEG readings have shown
up in commercial headsets meant for gaming or high-tech amusements,
including the Neurosky Mindset and Emotiv "neuroheadsets." Labs have even experimented with the Emotiv headset for driving cars.
Samsung doesn't expect to put out mobile devices using the technology
anytime soon given the imperfect nature of current mind control
technology. Kevin Brown, a senior inventor at IBM's emerging technology
lab, told BBC News
that testers had needed 20 minutes just to send an e-mail with mind
control during one IBM experiment. That's a far cry from the 25 words in
83 seconds clocked by a quadriplegic man using a head-tracking system a couple of years ago.
Still, Brown and other researchers expect the current state of mind
control technology could end up helping disabled people with conditions
that prevent them from effectively using the touch, voice, gesture or eye movement controls commonly found in everyday consumer gadgets.
Source : Spectrum IEEE ( 25th April 2013 )
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