Prof Stephen Hawking turned 70 this Sunday, beating the odds of a daunting diagnosis by nearly half a century. The famous theoretical physicist has helped to bring his ideas about black holes and quantum gravity to a broad public audience. For much of his time in the public eye, though, he has been confined to a wheelchair by a form of the motor-neuron disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (or ALS). And since 1985 he has had to speak through his trademark computer system, which he operates with his cheek, and have around-the-clock care. He became wheelchair-bound about 40 years ago and lost his voice in 1985 after he caught pneumonia and had to be given a tracheotomy.

While it is true that Hawking is a living tribute to human spirit and human body’s miraculous immune system, without which he wouldn’t have outlived the diagnosis, it is also equally true that technology aided him to a greater extent. Without his computer system, he wouldn’t have been able to communicate and we would have missed out on his incredible sense of humour, for instance.

The ALS disease has not affected Prof Hawking’s intellectual capacity, but it has robbed him of many physical abilities. The ALS causes a progressive decay of the nerves, and now his facial muscles are the only ones he can control reasonably well. Unfortunately, even that, as years progress is beginning to fail him.

Until a few years ago, he could only move two fingers on his right hand while still being unable to speak. This made a computer with a voice synthesiser programme essential for his communication. Hawking has had a computer screen mounted on the arm of his wheel chair, which runs a communicator software. All he had to do was press a switch in his hand to create words and sentences. Once he had built up a sentence, he could send it to the voice synthesiser programme, which would then turn it into speech. The technology enabled Hawking to communicate, write scientific books and papers, and give lectures. But Hawking’s condition deteriorated further. These days he writes on his computer by twitching a muscle on his cheek. The twitches are detected by an optical sensor in his glasses, allowing him to select words and letters on a computer screen. When he first started operating his system, he could write about 15 words a minute. Nowadays, he has been slowed to no more than a few sentences per hour.

Most recently, according to The Australian, the ALS, the condition that has increasingly disabled Hawking, is making even that muscle hard to use. So now a team from Intel, one of the world’s leading microprocessor manufacturers, will be working with Hawking to find a solution. One of the proposals is brainwave scanning where a headset or other device could be used to measure the electrical activity in the brain. Such devices have already been successfully used to help people with severe disabilities to communicate. Eyeball-tracking and facial recognition are the other solutions offered in case Hawking’s muscles deteriorate with time. The team, led by Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, will start work this week, once the physicist has recovered from this weekend’s illness that spoilt the celebrations to mark his 70th birthday.

In an interview with The Australian, Rattner mentioned: “We fitted an Intel computer to his computer back in 1997 and since then we have continued to provide support. The key aim is obviously communication. As his disease has progressed, his needs have changed. Now it's at the point where something new is critical to let him work. We are beginning the research into how that might be done.” According to Rattner, one problem is that Hawking tires easily and thus he might find it hard to retrain to use a newer system, especially if it were too complex.

Interestingly, Hawking's voice is itself contingent to the 1980’s moment in technology; he might easily shift his voice to something less robotic sounding, but he has come to be identified with the voice we all know well. According to Sam Blackburn, the man who has been in charge of Hawking’s voice for the last five years, “It wouldn't be Stephen's voice any more if he were to update it.” The reason why Hawking is particularly circumspect about altering his voice technology is that it could open a sort of vicious cycle; as Blackburn puts it, “incremental improvement is much easier for him to accept than a radical new system, because the learning curve associated with that is very steep. Stephen wouldn't be able to ask for help because the very thing he wouldn't be able to use would be the speech system.”

(The writer is a faculty member of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA and knowledge editor, of Financial Chronicle)