AI can now read the thoughts of paralysed patients as they imagine they are writing ZDNet

Handwriting is becoming a rare skill in the digital age. But researchers have now discovered a new application that could significantly improve the way tetraplegic people, who are often also unable to speak, communicate with the outside world. At the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in Chicago this week, a team of neurologists presented a new tool that could read out the sentences formed by a volunteer paralyzed from the neck down, in double the average speed recorded for existing technologies. The volunteer's imagination: he was asked to imagine that he was moving his arm to hand-write each letter of the alphabet, one at a time, with an imaginary pencil. Writing, since it's a movement, requires a certain cerebral organization that has already been located in previous studies as happening in the primary motor cortex.