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www.psfk.com 2015 00190.txt.txt

#Paralyzed Stroke Victims Speak Again Through App I. am. here is a mobile app that analyzes brain activity of stroke victims to give paralyzed people a way to communicate with their loved ones. The software uses Brain computer interface (BCI) to transform raw brain signals into human emotions, which are displayed then as words through the mobile app. The app shows visualizations of the paralyzed person state of mind such as: interested. I happy. I angry. The app was created in a partnership between Russian digital communications agency Adwatch Isobar, Russian stroke foundation ORBI, and mobile software developers Yarr!.According to the World Heart Federation, stroke is the second leading cause of disability worldwide. It affects 15 million people each year, with five million ending up permanently disabled. Stroke victims may lose vision, speech, and experience paralysis and confusion. According to the President of the ORBI foundation, Daria Lisichenko, nable to speak, unable to say a thing, answer and support a conversation, a person drops out of his or her life and thus, completely loses touch with relatives. For the companies that partnered to create I. am. here, there was hope and a solution. Though stroke victims may lose the ability to speak their brain activity can still be analyzed using preexisting research, and their mood may still be carried across through the app. According to Sergey Timoshin, CEO of Yarr! mobile studio, hen we learned that brainwaves can now be picked up, we immediately thought of paralyzed people. After we went through a very thorough set of consultations with neuroscientists, and studied brain-computer interface technologies, we knew for sure that this was a task we could complete. With this app, we analyze data from Emotive EPOC and transform it in a simple and clear form. I. am. here for ios and Android translates BCI data into human language and gives opportunity to go through all history of communication between paralyzed people and their relatives. For Alexey Fedorov creative director Adwatch Isobar, the I. am. here app is just a start. e believe that the product wee developed is just the first step along the great road of discovery, and we hope it would inspire others to join us in search for solutions that could help people bring back something theye lost. In 1995, journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a stroke that left nearly his entire body paralyzed. He wrote the stunning memoir The Diving bell and the Butterfly by blinking his left eyelid, using a letter scanning system and the help of a transcriber. I. am. here cannot capture something like the depth and brilliance of Bauby story but with increasing advances in technology, science and medicine, perhaps it isn so unrealistic to think that someday mobile apps like this one will help bridge the gap between patients who lost the capacity to speak, and the loved ones who long to hear them e

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