Scientists at Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), have demonstrated how a person with partial paralysis can control a robot by thought alone, a step they hope will one day allow immobile people to interact with their surroundings through avatars. The same technology can be used to drive a wheelchair or help patients recover lost senses, according to the researchers.
The scientists fit Mark-Andre Duc, who has partial tetraplegia, with a head cap to record his brain signals. For the demonstration, Duc, who was at a hospital in the southern Swiss town of Sion, imagined lifting his fingers to direct a robot at the university 100km away.
Similar experiments have taken place in the United States and Germany, but they involved either able-bodied patients or invasive brain implants.
This technology has limitations, said José Millán, PhD, an associate professor and Defitech Foundation Chair in Non-Invasive Brain-Machine Interface at EPFL, who led the Swiss team. Background noise cause by pain or even a wandering mind can cause interference with the system, he told the Mail Online. Further, while the human brain is capable of performing multiple tasks at once, a person with paralysis would have to focus the entire time they are directing the device. “Sooner or later your attention will drop and this will degrade the signal, Millán said.
To get around this problem, his team decided to program the computer that decodes the signal so that it works in a similar way to the brain’s subconscious. Once a command such as “walk forward” has been sent, the computer will execute it until it receives a command to stop or the robot encounters an obstacle.
Millán said that although the device has already been tested at patients’ homes, it isn’t as easy to use as some commercially available gadgets that employ brain signals to control simple toys, such Mattel’sMindFlex headset. “But this will come in a matter of years,” he said.