Why are necessary the tablets - like the Apple rumor one.

My friends and relatives, in these dates plenty of gifts always specs that you (as a geek) can inform (or have) about the newest tech gadgets...

This year I doesn´t buy anything "special" and many people ask me why this.  The reason I'm waiting for the Apple Tablet (http://is.gd/5EosX)

Off corse I want it, one reason I think that feels a part of my digital life that the iPhone or the Laptop can resolve well, is a "wearable" display that is not a phone.

But I'm not going to talk about this personal uses; I think this kind of device has some characteristics that makes it special for new kind of human-machine interfaces.

First that all I'm thinking in people with some kind of disease that restrain, impede or hamper verbal communication or locomotion. I'm thinking in paraplegics, product of strokes, or other kinds of brain illness.

Like the recent case of Rom Houben (http://is.gd/5EovD); in the study of Schnakers et.al. (http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2377/9/35), up to 43% of patients with disorders of consciousness are erroneously assigned a diagnosis of vegetative state (VS);  maybe some percentage of these can interact with things like the Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset (http://emotiv.com/) developed by Dr. Tan Le's enterprise, Emotive.

With this device you have a not invasive Brain-Machine Interface, like a "Soft Cyborg".

In the other side, you need processor power in a small cage, but not that small as a Phone; many of the people with brain strokes can use fingers or a hand, so they can " touch screens".
The tablet size and power has a well combination.  Think in this combination for example: An electric motion Weel Chair, a Tablet (like the picturers of the Apple one) and a brain interface like Emotiv working together.

A tablet has the power to be a small autonomous computer, and the brain interface could interact with it from speech synthesis processing to more complex tasks like wheel chairs control.

At the date: the Emotive SDK is only for windows, http://emotiv.com/apps/sdk/207/, the tablet doesn't exists, so lets see what happens on 2010, but I´m sure that a new tight way for human-machine interactions are coming.

Posted via email from Karel's posterous

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