![]() ![]() Somehow, they couldn't get a strong enough brain signal. Before the Intel project, Hawking had tested EEG caps that could read his brainwaves and potentially transmit commands to his computer. Gaze tracking couldn't lock on to Hawking's gaze, because of the drooping of his eyelids. "Initially we fed him a lot of these wild ideas and tried a lot of off-the-shelf technologies." Those attempts, more often than not, failed. "Justin was thinking that we could use technology such as facial-gesture recognition, gaze tracking and brain-computer interfaces," says Nachman. The Intel team envisaged an upheaval of Hawking's archaic system, which would involve introducing new hardware. He also had a webcam that he used with Skype. He surfed the web with Firefox and wrote his lectures using Notepad. EZ Keys also allowed Hawking to control the mouse in Windows and operate other applications in his computer. A cursor automatically scanned across the keyboard by row or by column and he could select a character by moving his cheek to stop the cursor. It provided him with a keyboard on the screen and a basic word-prediction algorithm. ![]() We now realized that this was going to be a much bigger problem than we thought."Īt the time, Hawking's computer interface was a program called EZ Keys, an upgrade from the previous softwares and also designed by Words Plus. It took him 20 minutes to write a salutation of about 30 words. "Unbeknown to us, he had been typing all that time. "He welcomed us and expressed how happy he was that we were there," says Denman. Haussecker continued speaking for 20 minutes, when, suddenly, Hawking spoke. Is there any way Intel could help?"Īfter the Intel team introduced themselves, Haussecker took the lead, explaining why they were there and what their plans were. By 2011, he managed only about one or two words per minute, so he sent a letter to Moore, saying: "My speech input is very, very slow these days. Nevertheless, his ability to communicate continued to decline. Since then, Hawking has achieved the feat of writing emails, browsing the internet, writing books and speaking using only one muscle. His graduate assistant at the time then devised a switching device called the "cheek switch." Attached to his glasses, it could detect, via a low infrared beam, when Hawking tensed his cheek muscle. By 2008, Hawking's hand was too weak to use the clicker. However, the nerve that allowed him to move his thumbs kept degrading. With this new system, Hawking was able to communicate at a rate of 15 words per minute. This system was then adapted by David Mason, the engineer husband of one of Hawking's nurses, to a portable system that could be mounted on one of the arms of a wheelchair. I said I would donate whatever was needed."Įqualizer first ran on an Apple II computer linked to a speech synthesizer made by a company called Speech Plus. "He called me the next day and confirmed it. "I asked if it was Stephen Hawking, but he couldn't give me a name without permission," says Woltosz. Woltosz had created an earlier version of Equalizer to help his mother-in-law, who also suffered from ALS and had lost her ability to speak and write. King spoke to the CEO of Words Plus, Walter Woltosz, and asked if the software could help a physics professor in England with ALS. ![]() Martin King, a physicist who had been working with Hawking on a new communication system, contacted a California-based company called Words Plus, whose computer program Equalizer allowed the user to select words and commands on a computer using a hand clicker. As a result, Hawking irreversibly lost the ability to speak.įor a while, Hawking communicated using a spelling card, patiently indicating letters and forming words with a lift of his eyebrows. To help him breathe, they also performed a tracheotomy, which involved cutting a hole in his neck and placing a tube into his windpipe. Hawking was flown to Addenbrooke's Hospital, in Cambridge, where the doctors managed to contain the infection. The doctors asked Hawking's then-wife, Jane, whether they should turn off the life support. In the hospital, he was put on a ventilator. Hawking lost his ability to speak in 1985, when, on a trip to CERN in Geneva, he caught pneumonia. ![]() Intel has been providing Hawking with customized PCs and technical support since then, replacing his computer every two years. Moore noticed that Hawking's computer, which he used to communicate, had an AMD processor and asked him if he preferred instead a "real computer" with an Intel micro-processor. Stephen Hawking first met Gordon Moore, the cofounder of Intel, at a conference in 1997. ![]()
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