I am not a physician. I am a neurobiologist. I work mostly on motor control. (And I teach neuroanatomy, though atm only at an undergraduate level.)

First things first. It's darned early days in all of this, and recovery from brain injuries is often fairly unpredictable. Even if she doesn't get significantly better - which may be fairly likely, and I don't have enough information to comment - what's hard now will likely become easier via repetition.

I'll generally agree with the comments that you're probably going to be better off dealing with specialists than trying to get a commerical EEG type device to serve in its place. Though down the road, it might make for an interesting project (and increasingly there are cool things being done with consumer hardware.) The expensive proprietary devices may or may not be optimal... but let everyone catch their breath first.

Where I think some research could benefit you all a lot is making sure she's seeing the right specialists. Getting in touch with the right people at your local academic hospital - which might, down the road, turn into your not so local academic hospital - is, long term, probably the most useful thing. As other people have mentioned, rest and support can be more useful than trying to fix everything right now. But if you're going nuts looking for options, see if you can start figuring out who, reasonably local, has a serious background in this type of injury, and see if you can get them to look over her MRIs. It can be pretty easy to end up sticking with a suboptimal doctor out of inertia. Asking questions and calling around can really end up being the thing that makes the difference in the long run. (And here I speak from personal experience from my own history of spine injury.)

If you'd like help navigating the process, drop me a note.

I was just at a symposoium where one of the PIs in whose lab a chunk of this work was conducted was presenting.

It is really promising. However, it's *seriously* early days yet, and spinal cord repair is not the same thing as brainstem. The problems are related, but I'd be pretty shocked if we were looking at any of this being done at brain stem levels in humans any time soon.

I can re-check the research, but IIRC, most folks even, after they've had some months to get used to their new situations prefer to live than to die. (It's easy to project what you think your preferencs would be... but you in the situation is not you watching it from outside. I haven't been through anything nearly this severe, but I dealt with a spine injury which I was told meant I would never live an active life again*... and mostly learned not to try and second guess future me.**)

* This turned out to be incorrect, but there were some years in there that were chock full of suck.
** Which doesn't mean I don't have a living will, but did influence how I wrote it.

And OMG, you might be in danger of getting pushed halfway back to *second*. Eesh.

And perhaps treat the women in tech as actual human beings? Admittedly, I've had a great many pretty awesome male coworkers, but I've also run into a fair bit of crap, and it does get exhausting and demoralizing over time. Neurobio is just so relaxing by comparison.

Like, say, men who make random generalizations about women?

"He." *snork*

Last I head, the applicability of laws relating to whether transfer of medium for personal use had not been tested for ebooks. (Not, I'll admit, that I'd hold my breath for a good outcome in the current climate regarding such things.)

The problem of course is that I do seed torrents.

This was my stance for a while, though my workaround was to buy hardcopies of the book and then pirate a softcopy (mostly for reference books which I didn't want to haul around). And then I decided I didn't want to devote the space or weight to the hardcopies.

It's not ideal, but there are too many authors whose work I really like some of whose work is under DRM. (And it's all fine to rant at the authors, but until they're really quite popular they aren't really empowered to fight this on their own.) So I am very loud about preferring non-DRM'd books, and will buy them preferentially. And I do not share non-DRM'd book I have legally purchased... and seed torrents of those I pirated. It sucks, but it's the best compromise in my specs.

Oh, and so not a "bro".

I keep having conversations with my students where I explain why they shouldn't pirate books, or at least should make sure that the authors are getting paid (for instance, buying a legal copy then pirating / cracking it if it has DRM to get a useful one.) ...and yet I have a lot of trouble trying to work up enthusiasm for telling them not to pirate textbooks.* Particularly problematic, as I've shown a few how to torrent. (Heck, I've shown faculty members how to torrent.)

* As opposed to professional reference books.

Well, yes, I did mean OSX, though in fact it's been true for both. (OTOH, in MacOS days, I was something of a Mac fan. It's a relative thing. I grew up on UNIX in an academic enviornment, and tended to favor Macs if the alternative was Windows.)

The command line is of course the least irritating part (almost non irritating, but often installation of common open source packages is somewhat more cumbersome that what I'm used to - it's gotten a lot better, though.) But it's the GUI that people tend to rhapsodize over... and I just don't get it.

More than a few minutes. The head of our lab is an Apple fan, so many of the lab machines are Macs and I end up doing a fair bit of server admin stuff. So, for some weeks at a time I'll be using them so several hours a few times a week... and then I'll go for months without. Of course, the less painful part of that is done remotely, which barely counts. (My first mini was a 512K Mac when they first came out. So I have fond memories*, and certainly maintained a preference for Macs through my Microsoft days, though I'll admit not being thrilled by many part of the business model.) And, of course, there are a lot of programming and analysis tools that we end up using on Macs - not even to mention helping my research students set of Python or whatever environments on their own machines - though they do tend to be open source tools and set up often seems cumbersome compared to working in a Linux environment.

What I haven't done is used them heavily as my main boxen for an extended period of time. And it's possible that might clinch it for me. Though one of my closest friends in the department made the experiment and ended up installing linux on her apple laptop after some months of trying to learn to love OSX, and we tend to have similar aesthetic tastes.

* Admittedly of things like my father convincing me to learn Modula 2 from German documentation because he thought it would be the next big thing and then I could teach him.

Well, no. At one point years ago my mother was trying to Lynx from a terminal window on her rather ancient Mac, and it ended poorly. (I never really did figure out what happened. She said the sysadmin told her she accidentally released a wild lynx on the server. I can only say what I was told.) She then went on to use Windows for some years (mostly because she could get me to get her software from the company store) and about seven years ago, when I was in town and showing her my new Lenovo tablet with an Ubuntu install got as far as Synaptic and said "I want that OS. I want it right now." So I posted a note to LJ, and within a few hours a friend produced an install CD, and the rest is history.

More helpful doesn't seem that unlikely, especially since it's not made explicit who exactly Microsoft is more helpful than. There's also always the question of what numbers he's using. Microsoft has been claiming to be more inexpensive for some time. They have numbers. There are certainly business who have moved over to OSS and had very different experiences. I don't even know that it's not true for organizations where the primary computer use is a desktop / laptop environment and users aren't particularly technical.

I'd like to think not - anyone have case studies? But that's the environment I understand the least. I moved most of my less technical family members onto Ubuntu years ago, and they're much happier with it - and my sister, who still describes herself as not a geek, is cheerfully working at the command line and modifying config files and hacking scripts. But they're my family. (Also, Synaptic is about the best thing ever for them.) But then, I still have a lot of friends who will tell me at length about how much better MacOS is, and I find it profoundly irritating to use. And Windows irritated the ever living crap out of me even when I was working for Windows. So there's clearly something I'm not getting.