Slashdot Mirror
Mind-Controlled Wheelchair
carnun writes "New Scientist is reporting on the design of a new skull cap control mechanism that could lead to the supplanting of implanted electrodes for controlling wheel chairs. The new non-invasive method has been used to control a simple wheeled robots and could have lots of psychological benefits for quadruplegics."
~~~
Next a car. It's not a flying car (which we are all still waiting on) but this has some seriously cool potential.
Let's hope the auto industry takes note.
(and it's good news for those that are wheelchair bound too!)
Professor Xavier comes to mind?
"Engineers do the work of man, Physicists do the work of God"
timmah. Timmah!
All things in moderation; including moderation
It's bad enough that someone is in the circumstance of not being able to move, but to force upon them some crazy wheelchair commanding them through mind control is just unconscionable.
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
I sure hope they build a good pornfilter into this device, you know, men thinking of sex every xx minutes, could play some havoc with those delicate electronics, relais, the gearbox....
I first parsed that as "Mind-controlled Weather" and went WTF?
And then it passed....
...And it will blink a light for communication. Once for "yes," and twice for "no" (or is it once for "no," and twice for "yes?).
"Stop" might be a useful upgrade.
... you don't drink and drive!
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
Whoa. That's like mobility Daleks or shit like that.
Why don't people work on making more of Stephen Hawking's exoskeleton?
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
In the novel that the movie was based on, the Firefox was developed from a project to create a mind-controllable wheelchair. So how long before we get jet fighters we can control with our minds?
:-}
Then it can advance to jet fighters that transform and can only be controlled by mind-control and a giant mega-fortress with a really annoying J-Pop singer.
THEN, we can have giant Evangellion robot warriors that you synch with that has a 1 in 10 chance of killing you (or driving you insane) just in time for the Second Impact!!
*Phew*
I think I'll go lie down now...
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
I have always wondered how the ninja was supposed to be able to know where you were going ot move and what you were going to do. Now we know... he can read the patterns in the air and see what your brain wants to do. You know this gives big brother a whole new dimention to play in.
So that i can have my hands free to do... ... other things :-)
"When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a frisbee"
Of course Davros from Dr. Who (http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/alien/davros. shtml)
developed a variant of his mind control wheelchair to host what the kaleds race would mutate into after their protracted exposure to nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) warfare agents, creating the Daleks.
This is particularly disturing in that he as more than a passing resemblance to Rumsfield.
when the user dreams they are moving? Similar neural areas may become active, and thus activate the wheelchair. If so, could an add-on be used to detect REM activity and incapacitate the device when the user is sleeping?
Well, as far as Sig's go, Freud was a doozy.
Getting a hig quality EEG from a moving person who is presumably travelling over uneven ground sounds like it might be a touch difficult. Are there other brain visualization techniques that are small and portable and are associated with phenomenon that people can consciously control? I'm not a neurologist. Anyone have any ideas?
I guess this is the first step to making a real cyborg.
...takes on a whole new meaning.
Whoa!
Imagine the crazy dreams that might make your wheelchair go...well...crazy. Imagine the safety implications if there were a cliff or something nearby.
Except this time, you don't wake up before you hit the ground. Or at least you hit the ground when you wake up. Hrm. I'm confused.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
In fact, they were stopped by running into a curb. So therefore, to progress the wheel chair properly, you may stop it on the following items:
Curb
Wall
Neighbor
Steps
Pedestrian (moving target bonus)
Car (again moving target bonus)
Cat (what else are they good for- makes good doorstops)
The Micael Jackson (Just think Left, Right, Left, Right)
Etc. See, stop is highly overrated.
Curb
Curb
Curb
Differentiating between EEG patterns could be advanced by neural network based analysis.
The possibilities are endless.
BTW, the Swiss institute mentioned in the article also analysed a Bin Laden tape and decided it was fake.
if I get blasted with Delta rays do I get one of these cool chairs plus a trip to Talos IV for a date with my favorite green Orion slave-girl? Beep once for yes!
Now what if someone get scared while driving such chair in the middle of the crowd and the chair starts uncontrollably rolling back and forth hitting people?