This -- or future developments in the area -- is of greatest possible interest to people who are profoundly disabled and may be incapable of communicating but remain at some level of capability/consciousness. Even a lossy, slow method of getting information in/out of them lets them participate in their own medical care (e.g. "Do you perceive pain?" "Yyyy" "I'm sorry about that. I'll adjust your medication.") and continue interacting with their loved ones.
"It has been shown that more than half of the time it is the family and not the physician who first realized that the patient was aware. Distressingly, recent studies reported that the diagnosis of LIS on average takes over 2.5 months. In some cases it took 4-6 years before aware and sensitive patients, locked in an immobile body, were recognized as being conscious."
Based on the Glasgow Coma Scale, people with Locked-In Syndrome _are also in comas, technically_. Figuring it out seems remarkably hard, and is almost certainly wildly under-detected. I'd be interested to see if we are able to use tools like this to discover whether our assumptions about comatose states are at all accurate.
Also, of course, the obvious Inception-oriented ideas would be good to test out as well.
You know, I've always wondered why, in edge cases like this, it's not standard to run the patients through fMRI to detect whether or not the patient is actually conscious before just consigning them to a bed with no interaction. Or am I mistaken, and this is routinely done?
For every 1,000 people who undergo general anesthesia, there will be one or two who are not as unconscious as they seem — people who remember their doctors talking, and who are aware of the surgeon’s knife, even while their bodies remain catatonic and passive. For the unlucky 0.13 percent for whom anesthesia goes awry, there’s not really a good preventive. That’s because successful anesthetization requires complete unconsciousness, and consciousness isn’t something we can measure.
Here we have a much more common problem than locked-in syndrome, a problem which anesthesiologists have been studying since before their job had a name, but we can't even solve that because we don't even have a decent working definition of what we mean by "consciousness" in these contexts, let alone what we can measure to determine someone's "consciousness". It's an active field of research, which is a fine thing to remember whenever we start getting too high on science fiction:
Slightly off topic, but have you seen the movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? It's about a man with locked-in syndrome. Only his left eye isn't paralysed and he writes a book by blinking the alphabet one letter at a time... If your glass if half full it's life affirming, if not it's harrowing. Either way it's worth watching.
> of greatest possible interest to people who are profoundly disabled and may be incapable of communicating but remain at some level of capability/consciousness
I understand what you're saying, but I think it's just as applicable to anyone else. Clear communication through writing is tough so when we can avoid it we attempt to verbally communicate our ideas but sometimes even that isn't enough. Now imagine being able to share your feelings with someone instead. You have an idea for an app and you know in your head what the look and feel is like, but you can't really describe it or put it onto paper. Transfer your thoughts to another person and I imagine this process would be much easier.
Or imagine thinking through tasks instead of performing them physically. Say I have a few vim windows open and my code isn't working. I see a few potential spots where I'll want to log some data. Even if you're a keyboard shortcut guru in vim or any other editor, you still have to navigate to each of those lines and add the line of code. If my brain were hooked up to my computer, I could simply think or look at those few sections and suddenly my code is there. Just thinking about this gets me excited about how much more productive I could be as a developer.
I suspect that if you can't describe the design then it is not a fully formed idea. Communication often serves as a forcing function. You fill in all the fuzzy areas your mind was glossing over. Transmitting the feeling would help the other person understand the context, but all the little decisions that happen when making something "real" would still need to be made by someone.
