Stephen Hawking and his new communication system
Introduction
I was going to post about Barack Obama and Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) but that will be next week sometime. I instead decided to get right away from US politics and post about one of my other interests, one of which is the positive uses of high technology in the modern world.
Intel Corporation has been working with Professor Stephen Hawking for nearly 20 years. As is well known Hawking has a motor neuron (MND) related disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis(ALS). His level of paralysis is now very advanced. Intel and Professor Hawking have redeveloped the system to enable him to communicate.
The Communication System and Professor Hawking
The communications system has become outdated so Intel have been working with the Hawking to facilitate easier communication for him.
Similar to the parts of an engine interacting smoothly to run a car, the Intel-created software user interface enables existing and new technologies to efficiently work with each other. The result: Hawking’s typing speed is twice as fast, and there is a 10x improvement in common tasks, such as easier, more accurate and faster browsing, editing, managing and navigating the Web, emails and documents; opening a new document; and saving, editing and switching between tasks.
His existing cheek sensor is detected by an infrared switch mounted to his glasses and helps him select a character on the computer. Integrating software from British language technology company SwiftKey* has greatly improved the system’s ability to learn from Hawking to predict his next characters and words so he only has to type less than 20 percent of all characters.
This information is sent to his existing speech synthesizer so he can communicate to others through his Lenovo* laptop running Microsoft Windows*. For example, to conduct a Web search, Hawking previously had to take arduous routes, such as exiting from his communication window, navigating a mouse to run the browser, navigating the mouse again to the search bar, and finally typing the search text. The new system automates all of these steps for a seamless and swift process.
This video explains how Intel keeps Stephen Hawking talking.
About the software
There are over 3 million sufferers of quadriplegia and MND worldwide. Hawking and Intel hope that this new system will inspire more research into using technology.
The new toolkit created by Intel can be customized and changed to suit different users. The Intel-created system is a modern software interface for researchers and technologists to create customized solutions enabled by touch, eye blinks, eyebrow movements or other user inputs for communication.
With the platform being accessible and free, Intel and Hawking envision that research and technology communities – such as those focused on sensing, text prediction, context awareness and user interface design – will build upon and bring new and improved solutions to market.
Intel are a well heeled organisation and it’s great see them working at the cutting edge of R and D in an important area of technology development in this manner. There are many areas such as genetic research where there is much more work to be done.