Stephen Hawking recently turned 70 but was not feeling well enough to attend his own birthday party. Hawking has lived the last 50 years of his life with Lou Gehrig’s disease and, since 1985, has had to rely on a robotic voice to communicate with others. If you’ve ever heard Hawking’s robotic voice, you may get the impression that it’s easy for him to translate thoughts into a robotic voice to communicate with others. After all, he appears to speak relatively quickly. In reality, his speeches are pre-recorded and he uses his cheek to stop a moving scroller of the alphabet to generate full words and sentences, a very time consuming process.

According to his friends and family Hawkings can communicate at a word per minute, as of today. Back in 1985, he was able to carry out four words per minute using Equalizer software and the help of his hand. After losing his hand moving abilities, an infrared sensor was put in place to interpret the location of his cheek muscle. Today, his ability to use his check muscles is waning and researchers at Intel are working to develop a system which would allow him to communicate without moving cheek muscles. Options being explored include communication through eye tracking, expression detection, and even brain waves.

Although Hawking’s ideas have been on the cutting edge of science, the technology to communicate those ideas haven’t. He has been conservative in this aspect , but his waning facial muscles are forcing him to adopt a new technology.