I've never yet failed to enjoy a TED lecture. I have to ration myself, because my satellite internet connection won't permit me to stream video for very many minutes in any one day. This lecture is about using off-the-shelf video game units to build for about $100 the kind of eyeball-controlled electronic devices that, up to now, paralyzed patients have had to pay $50,000 or even $200,000 for.
Patients with severe skeletal-muscular problems such as spinal injury or neurological disease tend to preserve their ability to control their eyes. Not only the optical nerve, but also the other eye-related nerves, are more like an extension of the brain itself, in contrast with your other bodily movements, which are mediated through the spine. When you add this ability to cunning little devices that track and respond to eye movements, it means that profoundly disabled people not only can web-surf but also can communicate and even drive mechanisms like wheelchairs. The lecturer in this video has figured out ways to make these devices so cheap that they're reasonably available to just about anyone.
13 comments:
RE your satellite: When we had satellite at the last duty station I ran into the same kinds of problems when I would need to download large updates. I was talking to the company (Hughes, fwiw) one day and the tech told me that there are certain hours in the 24 hr cycle where bandwidth is not monitored for overage. For Hughes, those hours were between 2-5 am eastern time...which for me on the west coast was 11-2. I'd check with your company to see if they have something similar.
As to the post, I remember a commercial about 10-20 years ago where a young entrepeneur was sitting on a bench in some European plaza and he's wearing these glasses that are essentially a computer with the display being the inside of the lenses. It was all voice and eye movement activated. I've always wondered why that hadn't come to fruition yet given all the advances that have been made in making electronics every smaller and more efficient. Guess somebody else was thinking the same thing.
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Once the man is connected to a computer, he's home free. Iron Man lives.
And the computer need not be on his person. It could be anywhere in his house that his WAN can reach, and if absolute real-time isn't needed, anywhere in the cloud that his secure connection can reach. He just needs enough local processing power to run his wheel chair or his exoskeleton.
This engineering breakthrough is pretty cool.
It'll also be useful for healthy people: in high-g environments, or in environments where precision is necessary but his equipment won't allow it otherwise--in a deep sea diving suit, or a space suit, for instance.
And, of course, there's a dark side. Now the government can control his thoughts.
Eric Hines
I hated my sat internet connection when I had it. I spent most of the time on dial-up anyway.
It's interesting that people watch these TED talks for fun. This is, though, what you would expect from line number one of the Metaphysics: "Man, by nature, desires to know."
We have Hughes satellite here. I can download without limit in the middle of the night, but although it's supposed to be possible to automate it, my computer always seems to go to sleep and time out instead. Things have gotten a bit better since Hughes issued a monthly get-out-of-jail-free card and made additional ones available for a small fee. They also changed their rules slightly about averaging two days' use. I used to be absolutely determined to replace them the instant I got the chance, but I'm almost coming around to them now.
...my computer always seems to go to sleep and time out instead.
You might look at your computer setting for going to sleep--usually a good thing to protect the monitor from getting its last image burned in.
You could turn off the sleep mode when you anticipate a long download.
I'm also not convinced the image burn is a problem with an LCD monitor.
Eric Hines
Actually, Eric, in today's computers the refresh rate for monitor's is such that burn rate in CRT monitors was negated over a decade ago, and with today's flat screen monitor the refresh rate is essentially equivalent to today's flat screen tv's, so screen burn is, excepting extreme cases, no longer a problem.
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"a young entrepeneur was sitting on a bench in some European plaza and he's wearing these glasses that are essentially a computer with the display being the inside of the lenses. It was all voice and eye movement activated. I've always wondered why that hadn't come to fruition yet given all the advances that have been made in making electronics every smaller and more efficient."
Unless I'm mistaken, the same bunch that invented the Intertubes, --Not Albert Gore!-- ARPA/DARPA/DOD have made such tech available in the egg crates that pilots of certain aircraft wear on their heads. As our VP would say, this is a BFD.
Tex, As far as computers sleeping on the job, a good place to start gathering the particulars so as to know which way to go would be to download -Doh!- Belarc Advisor from http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html It's around 3MB, but IMO worth it.
"The Belarc Advisor builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware, network inventory, missing Microsoft hotfixes, anti-virus status, security benchmarks, and displays the results in your Web browser. All of your PC profile information is kept private on your PC and is not sent to any web server."
This establishes a 'stake in the ground' such that you can diddle the computer to your hearts content and if something goes thud, you can revert back to a working configuration, because you know what it was when it worked.
Also, you might want to check your BIOS for the sleep settings (typically F8 or F10 during boot). If a message on how to enter BIOS doesn't appear on the screen during boot, knowing the exact hardware, via Belarc Advisor, will provide the key to sussing out which Function key will get you into BIOS.
I hope I've not bored everyone with known info.
Tex, it just dawned on me that you might be running a version of unix or MAC on your computer. *assumptions flow freely before the first quart of coffee gets the neural net fully spun up*
If it's the former, I can help, the latter, well, I've never spent much time on or with a MAC...
Yep, it's a Mac.
Help may be on the horizon, in a form that doesn't require me to drag out my Mac handbook or call the lovely young men at the Mac help desk. A neighbor about a mile away reports that there's a new wireless service in town whose tower may reach us here. We're going to see how the installation works for him. If it's good, we could get unlimited download and speeds of the kind that the rest of the world has been used to for ages now. (We're lucky if we get more than 400kbps most of the time.)
...that you might be running a version of unix or MAC on your computer.... If it's the former, I can help, the latter, well, I've never spent much time on or with a MAC...
Bthun, you may know more about the MAC OS than you give yourself credit for. Depending on the recency of MAC vintage, the two are likely to be largely the same. The current MAC OS is a UNIX hack.
Or so I'm told, operating from the Church of Microsoft as I do....
T99, that sounds like a WiMAX connection. If it reaches you, it should be a good improvement.
Eric Hines
"Bthun, you may know more about the MAC OS than you give yourself credit for."
Later this evening, say after 8-10 beers, I just might.* =;^}
*Thus lubricated, MAS (male answer syndrome), manifest in the knowledge pool, effortlessly doing the backstroke.
Completely unscientific, but when I was in college, I did an architecture studio project involving the book as site- dealing with the idea that we inhabit books when we read, while we simultaneously occupy the physical world. How to resolve the two? I tried a sort of heads-up display, but it's amazing how distracting it can be- you really can't immerse yourself in a text and still navigate through the real world without significant loss of comprehension in the reading, or accuracy in physical navigation, or both. Heads up displays are great for quick bits of information- as a pilot uses them- but not so good for everyday life. I don't know that the google glasses will actually do so well.
In my project, it turned out the most effective solution was to put a helmet over the reader's head that cut them off visually from the physical world, with the book on the exterior facing out- inviting someone to read the book to them. Complete interaction in both realms at once.
Had I had children then, I would have known this before doing the project.
All that said, there are obviously great uses for this technology, and it's good to see solutions like this made available at relatively low cost.
I used to read while walking, but it did make me a hazard to navigation, as I'd get lost in the book. These days I more often listen to a book while driving. I find I can still drive well in the sense of not changing lanes unsafely, but I can't navigate for beans. I'm on autopilot, very likely to overshoot my exit with almost no sense of elapsed time. Whoa! There's the Gulf of Mexico! I meant to turn east on Hwy. 188, not drive clear to Corpus Christi.
I tried playing language-learning tapes in the car for a while, but I found that those really made me a road menace. I once drove clean through a red light. Apparently the effort to listen to pronunciation, and especially to mimic it back, uses up a bigger fraction of my brain than ordinary listening does. I still listen to "Great Courses" lectures on my weekly drives to San Antonio, with great enjoyment. Some of those courses are terrific, and I know the route well enough now not to have to navigate much.
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