Delhi-born Arnav Kapur’s artificial intelligence headphones, which “enhance human cognition and give voice to those who have lost the ability to speak,” have been named one of Time’s 100 Best Inventions of 2020. Kapur, a 25-year-old postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), invented the device called AlterEgo at the MIT Media Lab. It made the list under the experimental category.
Time described AlterEgo as something that “doesn’t read your thoughts, but it can allow you to communicate with your computer without touching a keyboard or opening your mouth.” The AlterEgo user first has to formulate the question in their mind to use the headset, “a portable, non-invasive peripheral neural interface,” to perform a simple task like Googling the weather on their laptop. “The sensors in the headphones read the signals that the formulation sends from your brain to areas that it would activate if you had spoken the query aloud, such as the back of your tongue and roof of your mouth,” Time said.
The headset then performs the task on your laptop through a web connection. The headset uses a bone conduction speaker to inform the user of task results that only the user can hear. “The researchers found that the prototype device could understand its user 92% of the time. The interface is currently being tested in limited hospital settings, where it helps patients with multiple sclerosis and ALS to communicate, ”said Time.
The project overview says its primary focus is to help support communication for people with speech disorders, including conditions like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and multiple sclerosis. “Beyond that, the system has the potential to seamlessly integrate humans and computers, so that computing, the Internet and AI will integrate into our daily lives as a ‘second self’ and increase our cognition and abilities,” he said. .
The system has been demonstrated and tested with a small vocabulary of words or short sentences. “The current system is just a research prototype and will require much more research and development before it can be implemented in real-life settings.”
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