Tuesday, July 27, 2010
New Wheelchair Can be Controlled by Sniffing
A unique device based on sniffing—inhaling and exhaling through the nose—might enable numerous disabled people to navigate wheelchairs or communicate with their loved ones. Sniffing technology might even be used in the future to create a sort of “third hand” to assist healthy surgeons or pilots.
Developed by Prof. Noam Sobel, electronics engineers Dr. Anton Plotkin and Aharon Weissbrod, and research student Lee Sela in the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Department of Neurobiology, the new system identifies changes in air pressure inside the nostrils and translates these into electrical signals. The device was tested on healthy volunteers as well as quadriplegics, and the results showed that the method is easily mastered. Users were able to navigate a wheelchair around a complex path or play a computer game with nearly the speed and accuracy of a mouse or joystick.
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