Swiss scientists have demonstrated how a partially paralyzed person can control a robot by thought alone, a step they hope will one day allow immobile people to interact with their surroundings through so-called avatars. Similar experiments have taken place in the United States and Germany, but they involved either able-bodied patients or invasive brain implants. A team at Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne used only a simple head cap to record the brain signals of a patient, who was at a hospital in the southern Swiss town of Sion 162 miles away. The resulting instructions - left or right - were then transmitted to a foot-tall robot scooting around the Lausanne lab. The patient lost control of his legs and fingers in a fall, and now is considered partially quadriplegic. The patient said controlling the robot wasn’t hard on a good day. Background noise caused by pain or even a wandering mind has emerged as a major challenge in the research of so-called brain-computer interfaces since they first began to be tested on humans more than a decade ago.
While human brains are perfectly capable of performing several tasks at once, paralyzed persons would have to focus the entire time they are directing their devices. 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. The robot itself is an advance on a previous project that let patients control an electric wheelchair. By using a robot complete with a camera and screen, users can extend their virtual presence to places that are arduous to reach with a wheelchair, such as an art gallery or a wedding abroad. Researchers said that although the device already has 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 as Mattel’s popular MindFlex headset.
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