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Last year, Kennedy, a 67-year-old neurologist and inventor, did something unprecedented in the annals of self-experimentation. He paid a surgeon in Central America $25,000 to implant electrodes into his brain in order to establish a connection between his motor cortex and a computer.
Along with a small group of pioneers, Kennedy, who was born in Ireland, had in the late 1980s developed "invasive" human brain-computer interfaces—literally wires inside the brain attached to a computer, and he is widely credited as the first to allow a severely paralyzed "locked-in" patient to move a computer cursor using her brain. "The father of cyborgs," one magazine called him.
Kennedy's scientific aim has been to build a speech decoder—software that can translate the neuronal signals produced by imagined speech into words coming out of a speech synthesizer. But this work, carried out by his small Georgia company Neural Signals, had stalled, Kennedy says. He could no longer find research subjects, had little funding, and had lost the support of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Magic Oddball on Tuesday November 10 2015, @01:26PM
Either you must not know many 67-year-olds, or the ones in your area must be unwell couch potatoes... These days, most of the ones in my area are more active as they were in middle age: they hit the gym 2-3 nights/week, take high-energy dance classes, volunteer at all kinds of stuff, and generally live a fuller life than most of us do. Given at 67 they most likely have another 15-25 years left to live, most of which will be spent in good physical shape, it makes sense.