The system processes brain thought patterns and can turn them into left, right and forward movements of the wheelchair with a delay as short as one-thousandth of a second. That's a vast improvement over other systems that can take as long as several seconds to analyze and react to the user's thoughts.
It was developed by scientists at the BSI-Toyota Collaboration Center, a research and development center established in 2007 by Japanese government-related research unit RIKEN, Toyota Motor, Toyota Central R&D Labs and Genesis Research Institute.
The system measures the electrical activity in a person's brain using electroencephalography (EEG) data gathered from five sensors above the areas of the brain that handle motor movement. It seeks to interpret the measurements to achieve control of the wheelchair.
It can also adapt to a particular user's thought patterns to improve accuracy to as high as 95 percent, the researchers said. Training on the system for 3 hours a day for a week is enough to have it tuned in to a user's motor-control thought patterns.
In a video released of the experiments a researcher is shown navigating a wheelchair left and right between six chairs in a room using the technology. A laptop computer mounted on the wheelchair is all that's needed to interpret the researcher's thought patterns.
To perform an emergency stop, the researcher just had to puff out his cheek: a sensor mounted there detected the movement and brought the wheelchair to a halt.
Courtesy: http://www.pcworld.com/article/167525/toyota_research_achieves_brain_control_of_wheelchair.html
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