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Source:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218101872

Toyota Develops Mind-Controlled Wheelchair

Brain/machine interface transmits user's thoughts to an onboard laptop which
analyzes and passes commands to wheelchair.

juni 29, 2009 03:11 PM

Toyota (NYSE: TM) researchers in Japan have built a brain/machine interface
(BMI) that has been demonstrated to control a wheelchair using a person's
thoughts.

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.

A videotape of a researcher demonstrating the system has been posted on YouTube.
The video shows the researcher navigating the wheelchair around a half dozen
chairs in a room.

Plans are underway to use the technology in a wide-range of applications
centered around medicine and nursing care, the BTCC said in a statement issued
Monday . Researchers are working on increasing the number of commands that can
be given to contol different devices.

In the future, the BMI technology is expected to be applied to other types of
brain waves that generate various mental states and emotions, the BTCC said.

Toyota is not the only carmaker to develop thought-control systems. Honda
recently demonstrated a BMI system that could command a robot to perform one of
several predefined motions. One demonstration showed a researcher using his
thoughts to make the robot raise its right arm.