Thoughts to steer sci-fi style wheelchair

I’m charmed. I think. How could anyone not be charmed by a thought-controlled wheelchair that seems to actually work?

To answer the obvious and reasonable question, no, I haven’t been smoking anything strange. The story comes from New Scientist, the British journal of technology. It’s about thought control of hardware.

Quadriplegics would obviously like to be able to drive their wheelchairs. But how? They can move almost no parts of themselves. How do they then push buttons?

Over the years I’ve seen various approaches: tillers moved by the chin, photocells that tried to detect blinking of the eyes and so on.

Difficult, tiring and not too functional.

A thought that occurred to many was to implant electrodes in the brain that detect electrical activity in motor centers. This is both an interesting and a very bad idea. No one wants wires implanted in his or her head. Aside from the unpleasantness of the idea, invasive techniques can cause horrific problems later.

Well, what if you taped electrodes to the patient’s skull to pick up electrical signals inside? These are just little metal gadgets attached to wires. They don’t penetrate the skin. (Actually in this case the electrodes are in a skull cap.)

A nice idea, but would it work? Apparently it does, thanks to a group of European researchers.

The basic idea is that when you think of turning right, your brain generates certain signals. When you think of turning left, it generates others. The computer attached to the pickups in the skull cap distinguishes between the two, and causes the wheelchair to turn in the proper direction. It’s a simple concept. It is also a difficult one to make work.

“Early trials using a steerable robot indicate that with just two days’ training, it is as easy to control the robot with the human mind as it is manually,” reports New Scientist.

Now that, sez me, is truly slick.

At this point, the test system works for left, right, and straight ahead. It has judgment built into it to keep it from turning until various sensors tell it that it is possible to turn.

Thus if it is moving along a wall when the user, anticipating, thinks about turning, it waits to get to the door instead of turning into the wall.

The interesting question is how far the idea of controlling machines by mind can go. Scientists detest having their ideas turned into science fiction by journalists, and tend to minimize their predictions to avoid going beyond their evidence. Fair enough. But the question is worth thinking about.

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