I've come across a number of news items that have been making the rounds recently. All of these products have the potential to add a new way for people to interact with their electronics or computers.

First up is a device developed by a Japanese company that lets you control your iPod by winking via a device you put on your temple, one eye toggles play and pause while the other advances the track. A second more complex device hopes to silence public conversations by cell phone users with a collar that can read the nerves in your neck. The device apparently reads the nerves leading to your vocal chords and detects what words you're thinking of saying. The article states that the device currently works about as well as early speech recognition and can detect about 150 words. Although this product is in a fairly early stage, it looks to have some promising applications. The designers eventually hope to rework the software to detect phonemes instead of words in the final version of the software.

Even more impressive than the thought to computerized speech is a headset that reads brainwave patterns and relays them to a computer as a control mechanism.