![]() ![]() She told me that people in wheelchairs can still do amazing things. "After I broke my neck and became paralysed, my mother gave me a copy of A Brief History of Time, which had just come out. "Stephen has always been inspirational to me," says Denman, who also uses a wheelchair. The team of five included Horst Haussecker, the director of the Experience Technology Lab, Lama Nachman, the director of the Anticipatory Computing Lab and project head, and Pete Denman, an interaction designer. ![]() 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. 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." "We're going to be looking carefully at applying some state-of-the-art computing technology to improve Stephen's communicating speed. "I brought a group of specialists with me from Intel Labs," Rattner told the audience. 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, 2012. Moore asked Justin Rattner, then Intel's CTO, to look into the problem. I said I would donate whatever was needed." "He called me the next day and confirmed it. "I asked if it was Stephen Hawking, but he couldn't give me a name without permission," says Woltosz. 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. King spoke to the CEO of Words Plus, Walter Woltosz, and asked if the software could help a physics professor in England with ALS. Martin King, a physicist who had been working with Hawking on a new communication system, contacted a California-based company called Words Plus, whose computer program Equalizer allowed the user to select words and commands on a computer using a hand clicker. ![]() As a result, Hawking irreversibly lost the ability to speak.įor a while, Hawking communicated using a spelling card, patiently indicating letters and forming words with a lift of his eyebrows. To help him breathe, they also performed a tracheotomy, which involved cutting a hole in his neck and placing a tube into his windpipe. Hawking was flown to Addenbrooke's Hospital, in Cambridge, where the doctors managed to contain the infection. The doctors asked Hawking's then-wife, Jane, whether they should turn off the life support. In the hospital, he was put on a ventilator. Hawking lost his ability to speak in 1985, when, on a trip to CERN in Geneva, he caught pneumonia. Intel has been providing Hawking with customised PCs and technical support since then, replacing his computer every two years. Moore noticed that Hawking's computer, which he used to communicate, had an AMD processor and asked him if he preferred instead a "real computer" with an Intel micro-processor. Stephen Hawking first met Gordon Moore, the cofounder of Intel, at a conference in 1997. ![]()
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