Three people with limited to no mobility in their limbs were able to navigate a specially designed wheelchair just by thinking about where they wanted to go, a study published today (November 18) in iScience reports. Unlike some previous designs which used embedded electrodes or asked users to focus on points of light on a screen, which can cause eye strain, the wheelchair uses a noninvasive brain-machine interface involving an electrode-studded cap to interpret brain activity. After training, the users were able to steer their way through a cluttered obstacle course.
“Our research highlights a potential pathway for improved clinical translation of non-invasive brain-machine interface technology,” study coauthor and University of Texas at Austin computer engineering and neurology researcher José del R. Millán says in a press release from the journal.
The wheelchair is steered by an algorithm that translates brain activity inferred from electroencephalography (EEG) into movement. Tetraplegic users ...
