Controlling a wheelchair indoors using thought

Abstract

Several researchers have developed a wheelchair prototype that uses an electroencephalography a P300 (EEG)-based brain-controlled interface (BCI) to help amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients to move about in buildings. The P300 EEG BCI lets the user select a destination item on the menu, helping the wheelchair move to the corresponding target on a predefined path. The strategy requires minimum effort from the user, while the paths are software-defined without hard codes, enabling them to be modified according to changing situations. The EEG-based BCI is suitable for a wheelchair as it can deliver a continuous time signal, with portable hardware. A set of electrodes on a cap is fitted to an amplifying, filtering, and digitizing device, which transfers the signals to a computer for analysis, helping patients to move about in buildings.