Max Weinryb suffered asphyxiation when he was born and lack of oxygen caused irreversible damage to his brain. Now 15-years-old, he is “trapped-in” – unable to communicate by speech or movement – and has severe cerebral palsy.

His mother, Toronto resident Karen Castelane, makes it her full-time job to take care of Max and juggle his various appointments with a team of doctors and specialists that help deal with his condition. Part of that job has been a series of attempts to help her son communicate.
It's been a challenge.

“His cerebral palsy has left him with unable to move his body in a purposeful way,” Castelane says. “He can’t reliably move his arm to push or pull or twist, and he can’t do that with his head either.”

She says therapists have attempted to use a number of devices and technologies to help Max express himself over the years. But none have proved very effective. Switches are often mistakenly activated by uncontrolled movements.

A test subject is wearing a headband designed to interpret preferences in the brain.
But now new research from a study on infrared light brain imaging gives Castelane hope there may be a another way to communicate with her son - that works.
This technology works - not by reading or interpreting reliable physical movements or sounds – but by effectively reading the subject's mind directly.

The study comes out of the University of Toronto and Bloorview Kids Rehab and is published in the most recent edition of Journal of Neural Engineering.

In what’s being described by scientists as the first-ever demonstration of a brain-computer interface that directly interprets preference, researchers were able to predict a person’s preference between two drinks with 80 per cent accuracy.