This article describing how Toyota researchers in Japan have built a brain/machine interface (BMI) that has been demonstrated to control a wheelchair using a person's thoughts is important, and not just for wheelchair users.
The idea that human thinking can be transmitted to a device and translated into a command has huge implications for seniors. If the device can use radio to transmit commands, than any device, from your television to your refrigerator, can be operated remotely. Adjusting your bed, changing your channel, operating your telephone--it will indeed be a different world. Mobility will not be just limited to wheelchairs. Exoskeletons that you wear like a fashion-conscious spacesuit already exist and can walk up stairs as well as down the street. Powered by thought impulses, they could take many out of a wheelchair entirely.
"The system enables a person to make a wheelchair turn left or right to move forward simply by thinking the commands. The response time is in 125 milliseconds. One millisecond is equal to 1/1000 of a second.
The BMI was developed at the BSI-Toyota Collaboration Center (BTCC), a 2-year-old research center established by Japan's government research unit RIKEN and Toyota Motor, Toyota Central R&D Labs, and Genesis Research Institute. Japan has focused on the control of devices through brain waves as a way to deal with the projected shortage of healthcare workers to tend to Japan's large aging population.
The BTCC's system uses several sensors placed over the areas of the brain that control motion to measure electrical activity in the region. The electical impulses triggered by the rider thinking of turning or moving the wheelchair are picked up and analyzed by an onboard laptop that passes the commands on to the wheelchair.
The system has an emergency stop that can be activated by the user puffing his cheeks.
The BMI adjusts itself over time to the characteristics of each driver's brainwaves. If a person dedicates three hours a day to using the system, the BMI can reach 95% accuracy in a week, researchers said."
I'm excited by all of this--I was an avid science fiction fan in my youth, and we're finally seeing the inventions postulated back then come to reality. Sadly, though, it makes science fiction of today seem a bit pedestrian. But living in the future has its compensations.
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