A wristband that lets you send text messages and emails using your thoughts could become available next year.
A New York start-up has created incredible brainwave-reading technology that it hopes will become mainstream by 2020.
The incredible technology can generate text by picking up signals a person’s brain sends to their fingers – from the smallest twitch to a deliberate finger waggle.
Many people envision scary science fiction-style skull caps and wired helmets when it comes to mind reading.
But Ctrl-Labs has done away with wires and uses a device called an electromyography armband to monitor the hand muscles.
This means you can “type” without touching a keyboard and create text by just thinking the words.
The company was founded by neuroscience experts Dr. Patrick Kaifosh and Dr. Thomas Reardon, who created the Internet Explorer browser.
The technology is already being used to train patients to use a virtual hand before receiving hand transplants from donors.
Kaifosh hopes that they can shrink the gadget to the size of a watch strap by 2018, so that people can start training the devices to use them for day-to-day communications. Kaifosh is already able to play a game of Asteroids on his iPhone with the device.
Kaifosh, chief science officer, told The Times: “We are developing systems to connect your neural output to machines as tightly as it is connected to the muscles that control your speech.
“Just as you don’t think about which muscles you activate when you speak, you won’t have to think about how you communicate text to a computer.”
The consumer device could be used for millions of people for everyday tasks within three years, he reckons.