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Paralyzed Patients "Speak" With Their Pupils
sciencehabit writes "Lying in bed, unable to move a muscle, so-called locked-in patients have few ways to communicate with the outside world. But researchers have now found a way to use the widening and narrowing of the pupils to send a message, potentially helping these patients break the silence. The trick is a webcam-like setup that tracks pupil dilation. When people focus on a hard problem--say a math problem--their pupils dilate. Employing the approach, some locked-in patients could answer 'yes' and 'no' questions just by dilating their eyes."
I mean, seriously, paralyzed people would probably be bad candidates for teaching anyone anyth...
OHHHHH. Those kinds of pupils!
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
KILL ME
- Can we pull the plug?
- yes!!!
- Sorry, we can't, enjoy being a vegetable for the next 20 years!
Why don't they go straight to neurofeedback? The hardware is getting a lot less expensive.
Technoli
With this type of tech, pretty soon we will be able to hook them all up to motorised boxes with a single light that can blink once for yes and twice for no.
. .
While I am genuinely interested in seeing real, functional communication with a demographic that is typically cut off from being able to communicate with the rest of the world, I am very skeptical that this is going to turn into yet another facilitated communication hoax.
So in all seriousness, if you're paralyzed down to your eyeballs, how can your pupils dilate/contract? That's not a nerve thing? According to TFA, the dilation shows your brain stem is intact, but that some people couldn't even move or blink their eyes for yes/no responses. If they can't move their eyes, how can the nerves dilate them? I can see the blinking being separate nerves, but would think moving and dilation and focusing would be pretty closely related? Bad assumption?
Is there a doctor in the house?
oblig TOS joke:
Q. What did Captain Pike name his dog?
A. "Beeeeeeeep!"
.... oops
I sincerely hope that by the time I might get to that state that the idiots who oppose euthanasia have been recognised as the nutjobs that they are and that I can be put out of my misery. If you kept a dog in that state (in the UK at least) you would be prosecuted for cruelty.
It's an interesting approach but it seems like an EEG, that monitors brainwaves and allows control through that would be better, the article touches on that briefly and rules it out as too expensinve/time intensive to setup. But modern EEG's don't really take that much setup and are cheap (you can buy one from NeuroSky for $79 that has one sensor that goes across your forehead and connects through wireless usb for example) I'd much rather see research going on there than pupil dilation.
I've *always* answered hard questions with a glazed look in my eyes.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Ohhh, so it's just like the Voight-Kampf test in Blade Runner? Cool! I didn't know there was actual science behind it.
Not original but v apposite
Message #1: "Scratch my nose"
Message #2: "Shoot me"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Dilate for "yes" if you are not wanting us to not kill you. Oh, you have more to say? We'll come back in 4 hours after you binary out a message.
I must be old. My first reaction was, "Why would paralyzed patients have pupils? What are they teaching?"
Proverbs 21:19
If I was in that state, I would do everything in my power to *plead* for somebody to kill me.
What a horrific and cruel life it would be to be forced to live like that.You are *utterly* fucked at that point, and it would be impossible to live a dignified or meaningful life. A peaceful death is the only sane option.
While recording EEG waves isn't too difficult and could be done with something that costs $79, there are two issues that those units don't address:
1. Signal quality. In particular, the signals available at the forehead are so useless that medical EEG equipment doesn't place electrodes there, despite the incredible simplicity of doing so given that there is no hair to deal with. Attaching two or three more electrodes would be trivial for a technician to do, yet they won't, because the sinus cavities under the forehead ensure that there's nothing there worth recording. To get good signals, you need electrodes all over the head in every location in which hair exists, and you need a properly cleaned scalp, and a good electrolyte to connect the scalp to the electrode.
2. Signal usefulness. What you record with an EEG is just the summation of an enormous number of neurons. You've got 100 billion neurons, and you're summarizing their activity with a total of at most two dozen electrodes. While you can get some idea what is going on in there -- in particular, if something is going seriously wrong in there, that tends to be visible -- what you don't get is any signal at all that describes what the person is thinking.
The bandwidth just isn't there. Take 24 channels at 30 samples per second (anything closer to 60 Hz is either swamped by the 60 Hz interference or filtered out by the 60 Hz filter) and 8 bits per sample (while EEG equipment may sample with 16 bit ADCs, most of that range is used to compensate for wildly varying DC offsets) and you end up with 1 bit of information per 17 million neurons. To put that in perspective, say you want to ask everyone on the planet whether they want steak or chicken for dinner, and all you get in response is one answer per 17 million people, and that answer is "one" or "zero" and you don't even know how that answer was arrived at. Maybe some said "steak" and others said "chicken" and others said "bird" and others said "cow" and others said "salad" and the answer you ended up receiving was just the average number of letters in their response modulo two. How are you supposed to do anything with that?
All those things are are $79 toys for geeks who watch some cool video on the internet of someone controlling a mouse cursor, then they spend some of their disposable income on an overpriced toy, try it themselves for a week, then either give up and toss it in a box somewhere, or learn to control it by unconsciously activating facial muscles, then toss it in a box somewhere. If the things weren't useless, we'd see videos of people actually using them for useful things, rather than just promotional videos.
If patients are on pain medication or opioid medications, their pupils will be constricted and harder to dilate them to answer.
"widening and narrowing of the pupils to send a message"
Nothing new. We see this on Jerry Springer and Maury all the time.
There's a difference between a "spin-off" and an "invention".
One name: Stephen Hawking.