EEG-like device can help coma victims walk & talk

Waking the dead Deep coma victims will be able to talk and move around oneday,one of Britains top neuroscientists has claimed.
Adrian Owen of Cambridge University has already shown,using functional magnetic resonance imaging,that some victims who show no outward signs of awareness,can not only comprehend what people are saying,but also answer simple questions.Now,he and his team have gone a step further and shown that a similar response can be achieved using a much cheaper and smaller Electroencephalography (EEG) machine which measures electrical activity in the brain.
Owen believes the new devices could be available within 10 years.I would never have believed that within a few years we would be actually communicating with a patient who was in a persistent vegetative state.
Owen laid the foundation for his prediction after studying a 29-year-old man brain-damaged in a car crash in 2003.The man was in a coma for two years before slipping into a persistent vegetative state.He was seemingly awake,occasionally blinked,but showed no other sign of being aware of the outside world.
But Owens team and Steven Laureys of University of Liege,discovered it was possible to talk to him by tapping into his brain activity.An EEG,which looks like a swimming cap studded with electrodes,records electrical activity produced by the firing of neurons within the brain.A portable version of EEG costs between 20,000 and 30,000.
Source:PTI