TAIPEI, Taiwan - A cross-disciplinary research team consisting of professors and physicians from National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei Tech General Education Center, Shih Chien University Department of Industrial Design, and Taipei Veterans General Hospital are making use of R&D for eye controllers and a computer-brain interface designed for middle and late-stage freezing disease patients in states of full-body paralysis who cannot even move their eyeballs in order to detect patients’ intentions and accelerate their efficiency of external communications. The team are also setting up voice banks to assist in the reconstruction or repair of patients’ voices in order to meet their external speech requirements.
In order to understand patients’ most urgent daily communication needs, in the R&D of the two communication aid systems, a smart eye control device has been employed to meet requirements for emergency calls and home living equipment. Furthermore, the computer-brain interface communication system enables late-stage patients to communicate with family members through their thoughts, and when combined with synthetic voice, it can satisfy the physical or psychological needs of patients.
In addition to diverse functionality, the system’s AI brain scan and brain wave recognition algorithms can overcome the low signal ratios of non-invasive electrode measurements with a high brainwave recognition rate of over 90%. This shows that in addition to being safe, the non-intrusive brain-computer interface communication system is also convenient and accurate.
The R&D team has developed speech synthesis technology from the system’s small samples of speech reconstruction and synthesis output in order to overcome the problem of small samples from frozen disease patients. This will enable patients to carry out original sound reproduction and hear long-lost voices, adding to their joys which have been lost and recovered.
(TR/ Phil Sweeney)
