Just think how eerie it would be, yet also how peaceful - people all around having conversations on their mobile phones, but without uttering a sound.

Thanks to some military research, this social nirvana just might come true. DARPA, the US Department of Defense's research agency, is working on a project known as Advanced Speech Encoding, aimed at replacing microphones with non-acoustic sensors that detect speech via the speaker's nerve and muscle activity, rather than sound itself.

One system, being developed for DARPA by Rick Brown of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, relies on a sensor worn around the neck called a tuned electromagnetic resonator collar (TERC). Using sensing techniques developed for magnetic resonance imaging, the collar detects changes in capacitance caused by movement of the vocal cords, and is designed to allow speech to be heard above loud background noise.

By decoding signals coming from neurons, scientists at the California Institute of Technology have confirmed that an area of the brain known as the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vPF) is involved in the planning stages of movement, that instantaneous flicker of time when we contemplate moving a hand or other limb. The work has implications for the development of a neural prosthesis, a brain-machine interface that will give paralyzed people the ability to move and communicate simply by thinking.

By piggybacking on therapeutic work being conducted on epileptic patients, Daniel Rizzuto, a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of Richard Andersen, the Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, was able to predict where a target the patient was looking at was located, and also where the patient was going to move his hand. The work currently appears in the online version of Nature Neuroscience.

It would be useful to be able to move a cursor around a computer screen just by thinking about where you wanted it to go.

Researchers have been working on the task for more than a decade; some recent progress involved monkeys moving a cursor to specific spots on a computer screen. The price of being able to do this was fairly high, however -- electrodes implanted in the brain.

Researchers from the New York State Department Of Health and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have shown that it is possible to use brainwaves picked up by electrodes attached to the outside of the scalp to move a cursor around a computer screen. Previous efforts at monitoring brain waves through the scalp only allowed movement along one axis, like up and down.

The Noninvasive Brain-Computer Interface allows people to learn to move a cursor around a two-dimensional computer screen by controlling the electrical noise that the brain makes as it functions, said Jonathan Wolpaw, chief of the Laboratory of Nervous System Disorders at the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health. The keys to the system are recent improvements in signal processing and an algorithm that adjusts to the way an individual controls brainwave oscillations.

The goal of the Extension of the Human Senses project is to advance man machine interfaces by directly connecting a person to a computer via the human electrical nervous system. This involves measuring Electromyogram (EMG) and Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals and applying intelligent pattern recongition software to interpret these signals as computer control commands.
To date we have used EMG signals to eliminate the need for mechanical joysticks and keyboards. As an example of this we have flown a Class IV simulation of a transport aircraft to landing with our EMG based "joystick". We have also demonstrated virtual typing on a keypad using EMG. Our current work is focusing on using brain waves (EEG) to control computer software and the necessary algorithms to support this work.

Soldiers and stroke victims might one day have something in common: a device that allows them to talk without speaking. As this ScienCentral News video reports, NASA engineers are developing technology that picks up and translates throat signals into words before they're even spoken.

Silent Speech

Nancy Pinsker ticks off the names of five blue items, noting last the sky. She's better at this than she was five years ago when a stroke put a stranglehold on her vocal muscles, altering her speech. Since then, she's been chipping away at reclaiming the capacity for normal conversation.

"I feel if I don't come here and take lessons, I'll lose my voice," says the retired bookkeeper, now in her seventies. "Even now, it's not perfect."

For people like Pinsker who find it hard to engage in conversation, a host of new technology awaits. "There's just been an explosion," says Stephen Cavallo, a speech-language pathologist and associate professor at Lehman College, where Pinsker frequents the Speech and Hearing Center.

Now NASA researchers are taking a leap in the direction of deciphering speech. Neuroengineer Chuck Jorgensen told Discover Magazine that he's bypassing the physical body's normal requirements by delivering words via machine using subvocal speech. "When you're reading material…sometimes you find that your tongue or your lips are quietly moving but you're not making an audible sound," he explains. "And it's doing that because there's this electronic signal that's being sent to produce that speech but you're intercepting it so it doesn't really say it out loud. That's subvocal speech."

In a lab at NASA's Ames Research Center, electrodes similar to those used in a doctor's office cling below Jorgensen's chin and flank his Adam's apple, picking up electronic signals that the body sends to vocal chords. Jorgensen amplifies the signals and uses neural network software to decipher word patterns.

Tired of using a mouse to control your PC? Perhaps there is another option for when your arm starts to ache: your nose. A novel PC control system lets users nudge a cursor around the screen with gentle movements of their nose. Blinking the left or right eye twice takes the place of left or right mouse clicks.

The inventor, Dmitry Gorodnichy of the Institute of Information Technology in Ottawa, Canada, calls his nose-steered mouse a "nouse". In addition to giving people a change from the keyboard and mouse, he hopes it will make using a PC easier for people who have a disability.

And it could also provide more intuitive ways for people to explore computer-generated environments or play three-dimensional video games, he says in the journal Image and Vision Computing (vol 22, p 931).

Researchers from UB's Virtual Reality Lab have developed a new tool for transmitting physical touch to the virtual world.

Their virtual clay sculpting system enables users to replicate in real time on a personal computer the physical act of sculpting a block of clay or other malleable material. The resulting 3-D electronic shape shown on the computer screen then can be fine-tuned for product design using standard computer-aided design/modeling software.

"This technology will give product designers, or even artists, a tool that will allow them to touch, shape and manipulate virtual objects just as they would with actual clay models or sculptures," says Thenkurussi Kesavadas, director of the Virtual Reality Lab and associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Gadgets that let you control computers with a wave or a nod could offer an escape from keyboards and mice.

For once, I control the weather.

I’m standing in front of a green backdrop inside a windowless studio at Cybernet Systems, a technology research and development company in Ann Arbor, MI. A digital camera in front of me is beaming my image, real time, to a television monitor that shows a scene typical of a nightly news weather report. There I am, standing before a map of the Midwest. I extend my arm and begin twirling my hand over the blip of Detroit. The map behind me zooms in on the area beneath my palm. The city widens into view and comes into focus. Looks like it’s going to be a wet one, folks.

This is GestureStorm—a software system Cybernet developed to let weather broadcasters run through their forecasts with simple flicks of the hand. No wires. No buttons. No geeky audiovisual control panels. Move a hand one way, and you paint raindrops on-screen. Move it another, and you stir up a tornado. The interface is completely a matter of gesture. And if a lot of people have their way, this is only the beginning. Gesture recognition technology aims to become this millennium’s remote control—a fluid, freeing means of interacting with all the digital stuff around us. Think Minority Report. In that film, Tom Cruise stands before a futuristic digital display, pointing and waving his way through a cascade of images and documents. This stuff, once the domain of science fiction, is finally creeping into the real world.

Scientists are to implant tiny computer chips in the brains of paralysed patients which could 'read their thoughts'.

US researchers from Cyberkinetics Inc are to be allowed to implant the chips underneath the skulls of patients. The chips will map the neural activity which occurs when someone thinks about moving a limb. Scientists will then translate those signals into computer code that could one day be fed into robotic limbs.

The company, based in Foxboro, Massachusetts, has been given Food and Drug Administration approval to begin the trials of the four-millimetre square chips.

The 'Brain Gate' contains tiny spikes that will extend down about one millimetre into the brain after being implanted beneath the skull, monitoring the activity from a small group of neurons. The signals will be monitored through wires emerging from the skull, which presents some danger of infection. The company is working on a wireless version.

Can a machine read a person's mind? A medical device company is about to find out.

The company, Cyberkinetics Inc., plans to implant a tiny chip in the brains of five paralyzed people in an effort to enable them to operate a computer by thought alone.

The Food and Drug Administration has given approval for a clinical trial of the implants, according to the company.

The implants, part of what Cyberkinetics calls its BrainGate system, could eventually help people with spinal cord injuries, strokes, Lou Gehrig's disease or other ailments to communicate better or even to operate lights and other devices through a kind of neural remote control.

"You can substitute brain control for hand control, basically," said Dr. John P. Donoghue, chairman of the neuroscience department at Brown University and a founder of Cyberkinetics, which hopes to begin the trial as early as next month.

Speaking without using vocal cords, knowing which direction a telephone call comes from, or even communicating with the five senses are some of the dreams of Japanese researchers for the mobile phones of the future.

Nokia Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI) and Sony Corporation establish the Near Field Communication (NFC) Forum to enable the use of touch-based interactions in consumer electronics, mobile devices, PCs, smart objects and for payment purposes. Touch-based interactions will allow users to access content and services in an intuitive way by touching smart objects and connecting devices just by holding them next to each other. The new forum will promote implementation and standardization of NFC technology to ensure interoperability between devices and services.

Abstract: Previously, we demonstrated that after 400 minutes of practice, ten novices averaged over 26 words per minute (wpm) for text entry on the Twiddler one-handed chording keyboard, outperforming the multi-tap mobile text entry standard. Here we present an extension of this study that examines expert chording performance. Five subjects continued the study and achieved an average rate of 47 wpm after approximately 25 hours of practice in varying conditions. One subject achieved a rate of 67 wpm, equivalent to the typing rate of the last author who has been a Twiddler user for ten years. We provide evidence that lack of visual feedback does not hinder expert typing speed and examine the potential use of multiple character chords (MCCs) to increase text entry speed. We demonstrate the effects of learning on various aspects of chording and analyze how subjects adopt a simultaneous or sequential method of pushing the individual keys during a chord.

Activating a single brain cell in a rat can make its whiskers twitch, a discovery researchers say could help decipher how the brain controls movement.

Eventually that could help scientists develop devices paralyzed people could control, such as robotic arms.