Paralyzed Patients Communicate By Controlling Their Pupils
The Eyes Have It Cassi Saari A new idea for letting people with locked-in syndrome communicate Experimental setups for letting paralyzed people communicate usually work by measuring brainwaves, so they can be pretty invasive for patients. For many, it's probably well worth the effort, but one team of researchers thinks there's a better and cheaper way. A team of brain scientists from Europe, Australia and the U.S. has demonstrated that some people with locked-in syndrome are able to answer yes-or-no questions by widening their pupils. Usually pupils aren't under people's conscious control-that's the part of the eye that tightens in bright light, for example-but learning that control doesn't take any training, the researchers say. For the patients for whom the method works, a computer-and-camera setup was able to pick up their intended answer 67 to 84 percent of the time. The setup could be simple and cheap enough for people to use...