Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) at the age of 21, a rare degenerative disease that atrophies the body causing muscle paralysis. Gradually, ALS sufferers lose control of their arms and legs, followed by their hands and all other muscles, even the neck strength that makes it possible to hold their head upright until the entire system collapses.
For Hawking, the diagnosis was a devastating but not fatal blow. He was about to marry, had a promising career as a physicist, and had a whole life ahead of him. The specialists gave him no more than three years of life expectancy: he lived another 55 more. In return, he was immobilized for life and dependent on the care of his loved ones.
Hawking lost his ability to speak in 1985, after undergoing a tracheotomy following a trip to Genoa. It was then that Intel Corporation decided to work closely with Hawking to build a system nested in his wheelchair that would not only restore his voice but also radically improve his life.
In early 2014 and with the progression of his disease encroaching on much of his muscles, Intel unveiled Hawking’s last – and final – wheelchair. The open-source system that gave it voice was dubbed ACAT (Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit). According to Intel, it consisted of three parts: an infrared sensor or camera that detects facial movements, the interface that selects letters to form words, and the software (developed by SwiftKey) that predicts what the user is typing.
The sensor was sensitive to the movement of a muscle in his right cheek, capable of detecting the gestures voluntarily made by the author of A Brief History of Time to scroll through the keyboard (1988). The device was connected to Hawking’s glasses and functioned as a kind of cursor, reflecting the information from each facial gesture on the keyboard that Hawking saw on his screen.
The software also had a predictive typing system designed especially for him, which “learned” from the physicist’s vocabulary, written documents, and other phrases to anticipate what he intended to express with a high degree of accuracy.
On its official site, the “My Computer” section describes the features of your computer in the physicist’s own words:
“I can select a key by moving my cheek to stop the cursor. My movement is detected by a switch mounted on my glasses. This switch is my only interface with the computer. ACAT has a word prediction algorithm developed by SwiftKey, trained on my books and other writings, so I only have to press the first couple of letters of each word before I can select the complete word. When I have a complete sentence, I can send it to my speech synthesizer.”
The device helped Hawking express himself until the last of his days. The research and tests Intel conducted to manufacture the device (and the various prototypes) are freely available to doctors and engineers researching how to improve the mobility of patients with motor diseases such as ALS, which the last great genius of the 20th century maintained for more than 55 years, most of his life.
Story originally published in Spanish in Cultura Colectiva