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From
ZDNet:
The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Oct. 5 announced that it has made significant progress on a wheelchair that can be controlled using brain activity scanners.
The technology, smaller than a matchbox, identifies and classifies the user's brain signals (also called electroencephalogram (EEG) signals). This is translated into commands to control the wheelchair, which is assisted by robotics and computers.
Currently, the team is working with Australian commercialisation company UniQuest to find a way to bring the technology to the market. According to UTS, this may be reality in three years.
Dubbed "Aviator" (pictured), the technology was developed by the university's Centre for Health Technologies. The idea for the project came from Professor Hung Nguyen, who had previously developed electronic systems for the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children, and is also currently the dean of UTS' Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.
"I knew it was going to be a terribly complicated concept to work on, and at the same time I knew it would be very rewarding," Nguyen said in the announcement.
"I have two wheelchairs. One is SAM, for Samantha, and it's a semi-autonomous machine. The other is TIM. He's a thought-controlled intelligent machine. TIM takes more risks. SAM is a bit more considerate."
"Control of the wheelchair is based on a set of metaphors — something to associate with an action. For example, if a user wants to move left, they could think about composing a letter and writing 'Dear John'. The chair responds with its associated action and turns left. To go right, you could answer an arithmetic equation in your head. To stop, the user can simply close their eyes," wrote the UTS report.
Prior to this, the team had developed a semi-autonomous, "smart" wheelchair that worked using a hat equipped with a wireless sensor, which allowed users to send the wheelchair to a location using a simple head movement. Fine control is provided by an on-board computer and sensors such as lasers and cameras, which allow a 360-degree map to be created and followed automatically.
Nguyen explained that head movement and thought control were the most suitable technologies for the wheelchair. Voice recognition technology was discarded because it could be tampered with and prone to interference.
"People can mimic other people's voices. Also, when you go outside or turn music on, there could potentially be too much noise and too much going on. So we needed another way for a human to control the chair," he said.
"I started developing a head movement system in 1997, and it's only recently that we came up with a very small and wireless technology. The thought control technology took some time to get here. We use a number of different electrodes — though I'd prefer to use only one electrode.
"It's very much a fancy headband," he joked when describing the headpiece that reads brain waves using a small box attached to the back of the user's head.
