The article is not clear, they say the patient deteriorated rapidly but did the patient actually consent to BCI implantation before becoming locked-in?
My first question was that one: "how did they manage patient consent to implant this thing?"
Completely Locked-In Patients Can Communicate, Thanks to a Brain Implant (BCI)
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Re: Completely Locked-In Patients Can Communicate, Thanks to a Brain Implant (BCI)
#52Fascinating. I wonder if nerds like us could optimize the „bitrate“ of this. Lvng out mddl vcls is one vry smpl optn, fr exmpl. There must be even better ways, if you consider the frequency of words, for example. I wouldnt be surprised if one could reduce bits needed to express a sentence by 90%, if those numerologists that proved their worth with predicting Wordle solutions had a look at that.
Given the amount of effort required to communicate, I was struck by how the patient used the filler word 'gerade' at the end of the article.
It's not like they'd have something better to do. Communicating is probably the most exciting thing to happen to this person in a long time.
Re: Completely Locked-In Patients Can Communicate, Thanks to a Brain Implant (BCI)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sleep paralysis is scary. I haven't had it in 30 years, but I remember how shocking it was the first time. Curiously, in my case I also remember distinctly giving up and thinking "well alright, guess I'm going to die, wow" and being calm about it. Then the paralysis wore off.
I have sleep paralysis every night when I try going to sleep, and in the mornings when I try to wake up. Normally a few times in a row. I don’t sleep much because of it.
> I don’t sleep much because of it.
Insomnia and sleep deprivation are associated with increased risk of sleep paralysis...
Re: Completely Locked-In Patients Can Communicate, Thanks to a Brain Implant (BCI)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is not a coma, the brain has remained functional and isn't shut down like in a coma. The patient has ALS not something that degrades brain functionality itself.
None of that is relevant in any way. The patient's behavior is the same; it attracts the same scam, because the scam is premised solely on the behavior of not talking. Nobody cares why the person isn't talking. Autistic patients attract this scam too.
Bruh.
Re: Completely Locked-In Patients Can Communicate, Thanks to a Brain Implant (BCI)
#55My first words would be "kill me" but I wonder if that would be considered reliable legal communication
I think the patient would have expressed their wishes long before the breakdown of communication in this kind of degenerative disease.
Re: Completely Locked-In Patients Can Communicate, Thanks to a Brain Implant (BCI)
#56The article is not clear, they say the patient deteriorated rapidly but did the patient actually consent to BCI implantation before becoming locked-in?
I can imagine that any affairs would be in order and that the patient would assign an executor (and talk to them about things like this) in advance. I mean it was a deteriorating disease, not a sudden event.
Re: Completely Locked-In Patients Can Communicate, Thanks to a Brain Implant (BCI)
#57Interesting, the patient only has Yes/No control, and that's then used to spell whole words and sentences. There is a supplementary movie to the study showing this in action [0], it's slow but quite impressive when the patient spells out "Jungs es funktioniert gerade so mühelos"/"Boys right now its working so effortlessly". That particular session came out at 171 characters in 157 minutes, 1.1 characters/minute. [0]…
I did think it was going to be a very slow process, I'm sure a binary search / predictive text algorithm would work better. But that needs R&D costs, not to mention the patient would have to be taught how to use it.
Re: Completely Locked-In Patients Can Communicate, Thanks to a Brain Implant (BCI)
#58This reminds me of the "Lock In" series by John Scalzi. In it, a pandemic virus causes lock-in in about 1% of the population which drives immense investment in technology to improve the quality of life for those folks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_In
Re: Completely Locked-In Patients Can Communicate, Thanks to a Brain Implant (BCI)
#59This is Ouija board pseudoscience until proven otherwise. The scientist behind it is already disgraced. If there is any element of "assistance" in interpreting the locked-in patient's brain waves, the wishful thinking of the assistant likely fudges the results to create a fake message, exactly like an Ouija board. Scams like this pop up every few years, preying on desperate, sad people. See "facilitated communication…
It's been years since I looked into this stuff. I remember a story about someone with locked-in syndrome using eye-blinks to communicate letter-by-letter, or with yes/no answers. I remember they purportedly wrote a book.
Was that also discredited? Is there any standing evidence of communication by the locked-in?
Re: Completely Locked-In Patients Can Communicate, Thanks to a Brain Implant (BCI)
#60The article is not clear, they say the patient deteriorated rapidly but did the patient actually consent to BCI implantation before becoming locked-in?
How rapidly is rapidly?