Hope for people with Locked-in Syndrome or ALS?

One of the worst things that can happen to a person is something called "Locked-In Syndrome" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-In_syndrome). The reason this is so bad is that the person can still think and is conscious but is unable to communicate with the outside world because that part of the nervous system has been destroyed. In a sense, the person is "buried alive" inside their own body. This might happen as a result of a stroke that takes out a significant part of the left hemisphere or part of the brainstem in the pons, for example. People with ALS suffer a similar fate in that they lose the ability to move their muscles and eventually even lose the ability to breathe or keep their airway open and suffocate.

One of the technologies that might offer some hope is something called a Brain-Computer Interface (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_computer_interface). Using such a tool, it might be possible for a person to manipulate a robot arm or computer interface to communicate or otherwise interact with the outside world. It sounds a little science fiction, but recently scientists were able to get a monkey to feed itself using a robot arm that interfaced with the monkey's brain (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/science/29brain.html). Obviously there must be some limits to this technology and it has not been tried in humans yet. However the monkey and human brain have many similarities that make trying this technology in humans seems very close and I'm sure it is being tried to some extent already using EEGs and fMRI interfaces.