well it is time now for our latest
Bloomberg West series bioengineering the
senses a closer look at the technology
on the frontiers of medical science
today we're looking at the machine
behind physicist Stephen Hawking and how
smartphone technology is helping him
communicate that vital system that
professor Stephen Hawking relies on has
recently got an upgrade tasks that used
to take three to four minutes like
opening a word document now take around
10 seconds Intel has been working with
Hawking for decades and the latest
upgrade was over two years in the making
we completely changed the way that he's
interfacing with these aspects of the
system to have him not rely on the mouse
so based on whatever he happens to be
doing we would surface the most logical
things that he might want to do that
also applies to Hawking's text-to-speech
system UK startup SwiftKey whose
software runs predictive text apps on
smartphones has doubled Hawking speech
rape it considers what Hawking was last
writing whether there were any errors
and then tries to predict which
character he might choose next to do
that the SwiftKey program has to learn
how focking writes and speaks by
analyzing dozens of his documents some
published others not the tests we ran
showed that of a given body of text made
up of a certain number of characters
professor Hawking would actually only
have to enter around fifteen to twenty
percent of those characters and the rest
would be inferred now here's the crazy
part ever
think Stephen Hawking does on his
computer is triggered by one muscle in
his cheek an infrared sensor detects
when his cheek muscle moves up just the
way our smartphones can sense when it's
close to the face future versions of
this technology are aiming to take a
bigger range of movement into account
but you can actually today say yes and
no by moving you know his eyebrows and
by filling his mouth so one of the
things that we've been working on is
using essentially a camera system to
detect these different movements so now
we can for example undo things by saying
no rather than having to go and
manipulate the whole screen to get to a
back space button for example intel is
even trying to develop brain control
interfaces which could help people who
can no longer move any muscles at all
that won't necessarily happen to Stephen
Hawking but with the market forecast to
reach 55 billion dollars in 2016 it
represents the next leap for assistive
technologies
[Music]