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Comment by pjerem | Hacker News Reader

That’s terrifying.

When my grandmother had a stroke, she was unable to speak for multiple days. She was able to hear and understand me and she was able to answer my questions by squeezing her right hand once or twice.

It was an horrible situation. When it happens, you understand that someone you loves can understand everything you say but can’t inform you of anything they wish.

I could not imagine the horror if you can’t even answer with yes or no and being surrounded by people who don’t know that you are here.

Btw, that’s some important discovery that we can communicate via MRI. It must have been a relief for those patients to be able to communicate.

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For anyone here caring for relatives with brain injury, PLEASE don’t underestimate or don’t forget to try the visual keyboard solution:

Just draw letters on a big board and let the patient point at them. When it’s a possible solution, it is surprisingly efficient as you can guess orally and he “thumbs up” so he doesn’t have to spell everything out, and after a few tries you can tell stories. You can add bonus pictograms for ideas that repeat.

Thoughts to a fiend I cared for, a few days per week during his last months. After one night playing guitar, he never woke up, and I realized he went to sleep while we were singing him his own songs. What an enemy he was during life, he would have killed me if he knew my political opinions, but once he became weak and harmless and alone, no-one deserves to go alone. If only such people didn’t fight so much against the white christian male ceo archetype during their life… I hate life.

Your point about the visual keyboard is important. As long as they have a repeatable 1 bit worth of output, you can extract any number of bytes. You can have a keyboard where they can see it, move your finger from one letter to the next, and then when they do their 1 bit of output (e.g. blink) that locks in the letter. For the film lovers out there, there's a great dramatization of this in the 2007 French movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. [1]

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401383/

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