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Brain-Twitter project offers hope to paralyzed patients

Adam Wilson posted two messages on Twitter on April 15. The first one, “GO BADGERS,” might have been sent by any University of Wisconsin-Madison student cheering for the school team.

The brain-computer interface allows people to compose a tweet by focusing on the desired letter.

His second post, 20 minutes later, was a little more unusual: “SPELLING WITH MY BRAIN.”

Wilson, a doctoral student in biomedical engineering, was confirming an announcement he had made two weeks earlier — his lab had developed a way to post messages on Twitter using electrical impulses generated by thought.