Published on 06/29/2009
The Toyota Collaboration Center has developed a wheelchair that works with a Brain Machine Interface (BMI) that can react to a user's thought in 125 milliseconds. Toyota hopes that this research will eventually lead to helping rehabilitation patients.
Simplistically described as "mind reading" technology, brain wave analysis is a technology that has been in research for years. The simple way of explaining it is to compare it to voice analysis, which works with a single (sound) wave. Brain wave analysis consist of tracking many more waves (the subject in the photo seems to have dozens of sensors) at once and interpreting the brain activity.
Basically, the system is trying to match a brain pattern with recognizable pattern that it was taught before. Overtime, it can also get better at recognizing the "thoughts" or "intent" of the user. Toyota claims to achieve a 95% accuracy (that's really good) with basic wheel chair commands , but we would love to try one when the time comes - hopefully before we really need one of those.