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Move on!
Bringing hope to millions of disabled people who have little or no ability to speak, Texas Instruments Incorporated recently showcased the world’s first ‘thought-controlled ’ motorised wheelchair at the Texas Instruments Developers
Conference India 2007.
This motorised wheelchair is not controlled mechanically or even by speech. It is guided by thought and by a slight movement of the Adam’s apple. This technology has been made possible by Ambient Corporation which are based on the MSP 430 microcontroller developed by Texas Instruments.
When a person intends to communicate, an implanted sensor/larynx control system ‘reads’ the electrical signals that the brain uses to command the larynx to speak.
The sensor then processes and sends this information to a computer which carries out a direct command in the form of motor control. So to make a wheelchair move one simply needs to think about these actions and make a slight movement of the Adam’s apple.
“Different brains use different signals to form different words, but the computer can be trained to understand the brain by hooking it up to the patient, asking him to think specific words at specific times and noting the signals the brain produces,” says Michael Callahan, the co-founder and CEO of Ambient Corporation. More information is located on the World Wide Web at www.ti.com.
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