Reading minds

A UK researcher says funding is all that’s standing in the way of giving a voice to brain-injured patients who are unable to move or communicate.

Dr Paul Gnanayutham, a computer researcher from the University of Portsmouth in the UK, has developed a system that reads the brain waves or eye movements of people with serious brain injuries, allowing them to move a cursor on a computer screen and communicate with the outside world.

“This technology has been around but very few people have used it for anything worthwhile,” claims Gnanayutham.

“I worked with traumatic brain injured participants who were paraplegics, non-verbal and tube fed to give them a voice and the ability to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on a computer screen by using their bio-potentials.”

Gnanayutham’s system works using probes attached to a band worn around the head, or implanted internally. The probes pick up brain waves, muscle and eye movement signals at the forehead and pass them through an amplifier so the computer can focus solely on the signals from the patient as they try to control the cursor on-screen.

Moving their eyes left or right can move a cursor on a screen left or right; raising their eyebrows can navigate up and down. A patient imagining the brainwaves that they are creating can even be used to trigger the cursor to move, solely by the power of their mind.

Dr Gnanayutham has just one body-brain interface machine, which he lends to patients who have been trained to use it until another patient’s needs are greater.

Dr Gnanayutham is by no means the only person working in this field, and nor is he the only researcher calling for these techniques to be more widely available to brain-damaged patients.

Earlier this year at the annual meeting held by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr Andrea Kübler, a biologist and psychologist from Roehampton University, spoke about her work with patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neurodegenerative disease that destroys the nerves that allow the brain to control parts of the body, and leaves sufferers ‘locked’ in their own heads.

Kübler, too, has been using brain-computer interfaces to read the electrical activity of the brain and translate it into a meaningful output that allows the patient to communicate. Kübler’s team have trained around 40 patients over the last ten years, showing them how to use their brainwaves to communicate with the outside world.

In practice, Dr Gnanayutham’s work has required so many complex permissions that he has conducted much of his work abroad. In the UK, if a patient is under 18 their parents can give consent to try the system on their child, but he says it is almost impossible to obtain permission for a patient over 18 years old.

“The ability to communicate is the basis for interacting with your environment, and to be able to live a meaningful life,” Dr Kübler said back in September.

“That’s why I think it’s very important to develop these brain-computer Interfaces and to also further investigate and think about how we can improve the quality of life of these locked-in patients.”

Mind reading...the scientific way

Anna Lewcock