Intendix lets you type with your brain

My brain can type!

I’ve just typed out the words ‘howdy chum’ with the power of my mind – which is incredible really because my mind has the wattage of a dead glow worm.

Credit for this remarkable feat goes to Intendix, a piece of software designed for people unable to communicate any other way. It’s on show at CeBIT, and about two seconds after seeing it demonstrated I’d badgered Clemens Holzner – the software’s developer – into letting me have a go.

The first step was to measure my “large head” – Clemens didn’t take my badgering sitting down – in order to fit the skull cap designed to monitor my, for want of a better word, brain activity. Cold gel was applied to help the electrodes register my brain waves, and the cap was attached to a wireless transmitter which sent the information to the Intendix software on a nearby laptop. The entire process took about ten minutes, and by the end of it I looked like Darth Vadar’s ugly brother.

Clemens pressed a button, and suddenly my brain was ticking along on the laptop screen, peaking and troughing with alarming regularity. Watching your EKG spike every time you concentrate is like holding out your secrets in both hands, and when he joked that “everybody can read your mind”, I didn’t feel he was too wide of the mark.

The next stage was to teach the software to recognise how my brain looks when I concentrate. To do this, I was presented with a grid of letters arranged in a qwerty layout. Lights flashed across the letters, and every time one caught the letter I wanted to type, I had to count it off in my mind. During the training phase, Clemens typed in a random selection of letters and I counted each one off 30 times in thirty seconds. At the end of the thirty seconds, the letter I was thinking of flashed up on the screen.

By this point, we’d drawn a small crowd, and when he told me to think of a word, my evil brain immediately suggested several that would have caused me to be chased out of Hannover. Instead I settled on ‘Howdy chum’ and for the next four and half minutes I concentrated on the grid of letters and typed using my addled brain.

Clemens claimed that in a quieter environment, with somebody experienced with the software, you could probably get to one second per letter, though he admitted it would be “very tough.”

Watching the software in action, I was staggered by the possibilities of it, especially as it’s now being sold to consumers directly. Unfortunately, those consumers will need to shell out about 9,000 euros to type using the power of their mind, and I suspect at that price, most people’s thoughts are going to stay firmly in their own head for the time being.