The neurodegenerative disease slowly puts the nerves that work to trigger voluntary muscle movement out of working order. When that happens, the muscles begin to atrophy from a lack of use and eventually stop working altogether. Even involuntary movements like breathing cease.
In the s, Hawking's condition worsened and he started slurring his words due to his lack of muscle control; he completely lost speech capabilities after a surgery in , according to Biography. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Prev NEXT. Famous Scientists. The movie was based on Hawking's life.
Why is Stephen Hawking in a wheelchair? Stephen Hawking thrived for nearly five decades with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis ALS , a motor neuron disease that eventually restricted him to a wheelchair and limited his ability to speak without the aid of technology. What is Hawking's theory of everything? Woltosz had created an earlier version of Equalizer to help his mother-in-law, who also suffered from ALS and had lost her ability to speak and write.
I said I would donate whatever was needed. Equalizer first ran on an Apple II computer linked to a speech synthesizer made by a company called Speech Plus.
This system was then adapted by David Mason, the engineer husband of one of Hawking's nurses, to a portable system that could be mounted on one of the arms of a wheelchair. With this new system, Hawking was able to communicate at a rate of 15 words per minute. However, the nerve that allowed him to move his thumbs kept degrading. By , Hawking's hand was too weak to use the clicker. His graduate assistant at the time then devised a switching device called the "cheek switch.
Since then, Hawking has achieved the feat of writing emails, browsing the internet, writing books and speaking using only one muscle. Nevertheless, his ability to communicate continued to decline. By , he managed only about one or two words per minute, so he sent a letter to Moore, saying: "My speech input is very, very slow these days.
Is there any way Intel could help? Rattner assembled a team of experts on human-computer interaction from Intel Labs, which he brought over to Cambridge for Hawking's 70th birthday conference, "The State of the Universe," on January 8, We hope that this team has a breakthrough and identifies a technique that allows him to communicate at levels he had a few years ago.
Hawking had been too ill to attend his own birthday party, so he met the Intel experts some weeks later at his office in the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge. She told me that people in wheelchairs can still do amazing things. Looking back, I realize how prophetic that was. After the Intel team introduced themselves, Haussecker took the lead, explaining why they were there and what their plans were.
Haussecker continued speaking for 20 minutes, when, suddenly, Hawking spoke. It took him 20 minutes to write a salutation of about 30 words.
It stopped us all in our tracks. It was poignant. We now realized that this was going to be a much bigger problem than we thought. At the time, Hawking's computer interface was a program called EZ Keys, an upgrade from the previous softwares and also designed by Words Plus. Follow Quartz. These are some of our most ambitious editorial projects.
From our Obsession. By Dave Gershgorn Artificial intelligence reporter. Published March 14, This article is more than 2 years old.
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