[ballard]

This suggests future work on assistive devices that may be able to "speak for" a patient by ML and manual algorithmic adjustment... Huge quality-of-life improvement potential for people with limited/impaired vocal-ability.

Beyond that, there is far wider potential for translating brain scans directly and skipping vocal-aural pathway by communicating with others digitally.

[ChuckMcM]

I was thinking this as well. It reminded me of the "Commander Pike" character in the original Star Trek that could only respond yes or no through a light.

[return0]

Unfortunately fMRI is not suitable for the kind of precision needed for such stuff. Usually implanted electrode arrays are used instead http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multielectrode_array#Applicatio...

[Houshalter]

There is evidence that it is. They have been able to record images people are seeing from fMRI data. The information is there, it's just a matter of processing it.

[ballard]

Right now, researchers are putting together functional brain structure maps combining fMRI, SPECT and PET scans for Alzheimer's research. Apart from the inconvenience of wearing a giant magnet, pulling together one or more brain scan techs with compute resources might be a way to pull it off. Heck, if the compute power needed were too bulky to be practical, it might be possible to offload it to a hosted service. (Talking a solution 15-18 yrs out anyhow.). It's entirely reasonable that keyboards would be slower than thought input in 50 years.