Smartphone-based solution designed to help people who need to communicate with eye gestures

ALS is a neuro degenerative illness causing the person to lose motor control. The condition is referred to as the person being in a locked-in syndrome, where patients retain cognitive function but cannot speak and cannot write.

So how can they communicate? Through eye movement. Sam Dean, The Telegraph, noted that ALS is a type of motor neurone disease (MND). ALS stands for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
He said that eye movements can become the only way for people with motor neurone disease, which causes muscle wastage through nerve damage. ALS is the most common form, with both upper and lower motor neurone involvement, said the Motor Neurone Disease Association.
And now an app has been designed to help people with ALS speak just using their eyes. Their solution uses a smartphone to capture eye gestures and interpret them.
They tested their eye gesture recognition on recent models of the iPhone and iPad.
A paper has been written on the topic of having developed the system and study results.
"Smartphone-based gaze gesture communication for people with motor disabilities," is by Xiaoyi Zhang, Karish Kulkarni, Meredith Morris.

Zhang is from the University of Washington and the other two authors' affiliation is listed as the Enable team at Microsoft Research.
To appreciate what they have done, it helps to consider the limitations of past attempts to support people suffering from this condition.
Solutions using eye tracking technology have been pricey. Also, traditional solutions relying on infra-red cameras do not perform well in situations such as bright sunlight.
The authors said that their algorithm "works in a variety of lighting conditions, including indoors and outdoors. Since it uses an RGB rather than IR camera, its performance is unlikely to be degraded under sunlight."
 Another solution out there has been the low-cost, low-tech, eye-gaze transfer (e-tran) boards. This is where a caregiver holds up a transparent board with groupings of letters. And the person with ALS performs eye gestures to select a letter. Here, the limitations are that the process is slow. Also, carrying out the process requires practice and skills for the person interpreting gaze patterns.
The mobile application that this team devised automates that eye-gaze e-tran experience. It can be considered as a low cost alternative as a communication tool—or supplement to other eye-tracking systems. It's easier and faster to use than the actual boards.
How it works: The interpreter holds the phone and points the back camera to the person communicating.
A printed key taped to the phone's case provides the visual indication of letter groupings for the speaker. As Dean explained, when the person wanting to speak looks in a certain direction, the app registers which group of letters is being looked at.
The calibration is simple and easy to perform. This GazeSpeak app has three major components. The three are eye gaze recognition, a word prediction engine and text entry interfaces.
Study results found that the app significantly improved communication time over standard e-tran boards. According to the authors, "Our user studies show that GazeSpeak surpasses e-tran boards (a commonly-used low-tech solution) in both communication speed and usability, with a low rate of wrong recognition."
A video about their research was published on Jan. 16 by Meredith Morris, a co author.
According to reports, the app will be presented in May, at the Conference in Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Driverless Cars Must Have Steering Wheels, Brake Pedals, Feds Say

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Driverless Cars Must Have Steering Wheels, Brake Pedals, Feds Say

Autonomous vehicles could meet current safety standards, but only if they include standard features found in traditional models

By Larry Greenemeier on March 16, 2016

Courtesy of PhotoDisc/Getty Images

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Driverless cars should have a fairly easy time getting the green light to operate on U.S. roadways, as long as they look and act like the vehicles people have been driving for the past century. Take away the steering wheel and brake pedal—as Google hopes to do from its self-driving car—and that vehicle is no longer street legal and probably would not be for some time, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DoT).

As carmakers move at full throttle on efforts to rethink the automobile, the DoT is scrambling to figure out how it can adjust decades of driver safety regulations to accommodate vehicles driven entirely by computers. DoT’s Volpe, The National Transportation Systems Center reviewed current Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and concluded that increasing levels of automation for parking, lane changing, collision avoidance and other maneuvers is acceptable, provided that the vehicle also has a driver’s seat, steering wheel, brake pedal and other features commonly found in today’s automobiles.

Implementing more radical changes, such as using smartphone-control, replacing the windshield with large video displays or realigning seats so there is no clear “driver,” would prevent approval under current safety standards, according to the new report. The DoT likewise tries to envision the impact of other futuristic features on safety that include using illuminated vehicles instead of headlights for nighttime driving or eschewing turn signals and taillights in favor of wireless communication with other connected cars (neither of which would pass muster under existing standards).

Google’s parent corporation, Alphabet, Inc., is pushing back against the government’s assessment by arguing that the company’s artificially intelligent self-driving system could be interpreted as a vehicle’s driver. “Developing a car that can shoulder the entire burden of driving is crucial to safety,” said Chris Urmson, director of Alphabet’s self-driving car project, during a Congressional hearing on Tuesday. “We saw in our own testing that the human drivers can’t always be trusted to dip in and out of the task of driving when the car is encouraging them to sit back and relax.”

Urmson urged lawmakers on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation to create a legislative on-ramp that will get fully autonomous vehicles on the road as quickly as possible. He also called for the federal government to create national policies regulating driverless automobile safety, rather than leaving these decisions to individual states. So far, 23 states have proposed a total of 55 different laws related to autonomous vehicles. California, in particular, is at odds with Google because the state wants to ban driverless cars that do not have a licensed driver behind the wheel.

The DoT’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) last week announced a pair of public meetings this spring to help the agency draft driverless vehicle safety guidelines. The Obama administration has said it wants these rules to be available to states, policy makers and companies by July so they have a better idea of how to invest in their next-generation vehicles and infrastructure. Such guidance is also needed to help ensure that the nearly $4 billion the White House wants to dole out over the next decade to speed the development of autonomous vehicles is well spent.

As the regulatory situation plays out in the coming months, carmakers continue to buy into the autonomous movement. General Motors last week agreed to acquire Cruise Automation, a San Francisco–based maker of software for self-driving cars. GM has also said it is developing anautonomous version of the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid. Not to be outdone, rival Ford Motor Co. on Fridaylaunched a new Ford Smart Mobility subsidiary responsible for, among other things, developing autonomous driving technology.

Efforts to shut out human drivers notwithstanding, stepwise automation of various features offers a more realistic short-term view of how the shift to driverless cars will play out, according to Ragunathan “Raj” Rajkumar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering in Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab and veteran of the university’s efforts to develop autonomous vehicles, including the Boss SUV that won the DARPA 2007 Urban Challenge. “The transition to roadways filled with driverless drones will be gradual,” he says. “People will buy cars with more and more autonomous features in the coming years until, sometime in the 2020s, the majority of vehicles on the road will for the most part be fully autonomous.”

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Memories retrieved in mutant ‘Alzheimer’s’ mice

Study suggests that patients with Alzheimer's disease can still form memories, raising hopes of new treatments.

Sara Reardon
This cross-section of a mouse brain shows the amyloid protein clusters (green) that build up as Alzheimer's disease progresses.

People with Alzheimer's disease may forget faces or where they left familiar objects because their brains cannot find where they put those memories, a study in mice suggests.

The study, reported in Nature¹, contradicts the notion that Alzheimer’s prevents the brain from making new memories. It also suggests that brain stimulation might temporarily improve the memories of patients in the early stages of the disease.

The research builds on earlier work by lead author Susumu Tonegawa, a neuroscientist, and his colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Last year, they showed that in certain types of amnesia, memories were stored but could not be retrieved².

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It is difficult to detect the difference between a stored and a retrieved memory in humans, as the only way to test memory is to ask patients to recall information. But memories can be manipulated in mice, so Tonegawa and his colleagues tested their theory using two strains of mice with mutations in genes linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

These mice develop amyloid protein clusters, or plaques, in their brains and eventually lose their memories — just as humans with Alzheimer's disease do. The researchers demonstrated this memory loss by placing the mice in a box in which they received an electric shock. Normal mice learned to fear the box, but the mutant mice did not, because they did not remember being shocked.

Thinking inside the box

The researchers engineered the mutant mice to make a  light-sensitive protein in neurons in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that encodes short-term memories. Then the scientists placed the mice back into the box, shining a light onto the animals' brains to force the modified neurons to fire. This caused the mice to recall the memory of being shocked, and the animals froze — suggesting that the memory had been encoded in the first place. But the next day, the mice had again forgotten their fear of the box.

Next, the scientists pulsed the light, mimicking a process that occurs naturally as a memory is accessed repeatedly over time. This strengthened the connections between the hippocampus and another brain region called the entorhinal cortex, a connection that serves as long-term memory storage. With the memories now firmly embedded, the mice remembered to be afraid of the box, even when the light was off.

Dheeraj Roy

Scientists studying memory loss in mice engineered some neurons (shown in green) to make a light-sensitive protein.

When the researchers dissected the animals’ brains, they found that the pulsing stimulation had created more connections between the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex — connections that are lost as Alzheimer's disease progresses. But the researchers expect that the the technique would only work for a few months in mice, or two to three years in humans, before the disease advances enough to erase any gains.

This theory about how Alzheimer's affects the brain agrees with symptoms seen in patients. For unknown reasons, the hippocampus is particularly vulnerable to the ravages of Alzheimer's, which is why a person with the disease first forgets new memories, such as where he left his car. As the disease worsens, other parts of the brain are destroyed, causing patients to forget long-term information such as family members’ names.

Stimulating memories

“It’s a beautifully executed study,” says Itzhak Fried, a neurosurgeon at the University of California Los Angeles. But he cautions that the findings may not translate to human brains, because mice do not develop amyloid plaques in the same way as humans do. And it is impossible to test whether the memory-retrieval hypothesis holds true in humans, because researchers have not worked out how to stimulate human brains using light.

Christine Denny, a neurobiologist at Columbia University in New York City, says that electrical stimulation may succeed where optogenetics has not. Early trials suggest that deep-brain stimulation of the hippocampus prompts the creation of neurons and improves memory in some Alzheimer's patients. But no one knows how it works³.

Tonegawa's findings may allow more targeted stimulation, especially once researchers understand what happens to memories after they leave the hippocampus. Several groups, including Fried’s, are already implanting such fine-tuned micro-stimulation devices into the entorhinal cortices of epilepsy patientswith brain injuries in the hope of restoring memory abilities.

Fried says that it might soon be time to test microstimulation in very small groups of people with Alzheimer's disease. Although he acknowledges that it is important to do more animal work, especially in primates, “at the same time we’re crying for relief of clinical symptoms in patients who are really suffering”.
 

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Islamic State wametekeleza ‘mauaji ya halaiki’

arekani imesema kundi la wapiganaji wa Kiislamu
linalojiita Islamic State (IS) limetekeleza mauaji ya
halaiki dhidi ya Wayazidi, Wakristo na waislamu wa
madhehebu ya Shia.
Waziri wa mashauri ya kigeni wa Marekani John Kerry
ametangaza IS, kundi ambalo limekuwa pia likiitwa
Daesh, kuwa la “mauaji ya halaiki kwa kujitangaza
kwenyewe, sera na matendo”.
Bw Kerry pia amesema kundi hilo limtekeleza makosa
ya uhalifu dhidi ya binadamu na mauaji ya kimbari.
Amesema Marekani imefikia uamuzi huo kwa kufuata
habari ambazo zimekusanywa na vyanzo mbalimbali.

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