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Comment by justAlittleCom | Hacker News Reader

How does this compare to eyes tracking? 90% of the hyper fancy things using brain activity get pwned by simple eye tracking. Or are not usable in real life due to the equipment needed.

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Even if eye tracking is better (and IIRC it is), this is still valuable for patients that don't have any other option left (like Stephen Hawking soon).

This still relies on visual feedback (you need to move a cursor on a screen). It would be better if you just had to think the letter itself, not drive a cursor over it.

Not much of a difference, actually. Once you've got your brain trained to select the letters by location you can remove the eye tracking part and just use abstract thought.

"I'm thinking of a letter... On the far left of the keyboard, middle row."

I think there's not enough bandwidth for such information density. These usually work with 2D directional commands, you're driving the cursor up/down/left/right. You're not thinking of "letter E", but look at the screen and think of the direction where the cursor has to move from its current location to drift to E.

You can use auditory feedback instead of visual feedback to drive the system. Even if you are down to say 2 words per minute that's vastly better than zero.

This is a valid point and a real challenge of brain-computer interface (BCI) technology. It is largely trying to help those who suffer from locked-in syndrome, where they really do not have any reliable motor control at all, including eye movement. If you do have the ability to reliably execute any kind of motor control, such as eye movement or muscle twitch, that can be exploited for more effective, durable interface control than current state of the art of BCI.

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