Japan has always been a leader in advanced robotics so it should come as very little surprise to hear that they’ve recently pioneered another marvel of technology: a motorized wheelchair that is capable of reading your thoughts. On Monday, June 29, 2009, Toyota demonstrated a wheelchair that could translate its user’s brainwaves into motion.

The wheelchair requires that you attach a sensor grid to your head. An EEG sensor cap measures brain activity through five electrodes placed above the areas of the brain that are in charge of motor skills. The wheelchair has a quick response time, with a delay between thought and action of less than 125 ms (milliseconds). Translating brain patterns, the chair is capable of turning left, right, or moving forward.

You might think that technology this advanced must come with its fair share of gremlins or a steep learning curve but Toyota promises that the wheelchair is capable of understanding 95% of all commands coming from its driver and does not require learning signals; the chair will instead move forward when the driver thinks of walking.

This technology is still in its development stages, however Toyota’s plan is to help people with rehabilitation and to help seniors (it is estimated that in forty years, the elderly will account for more than 40% of Japan’s population). If you, like me, have trouble obscuring your thoughts, however, the chair comes with a safety measure for that; an emergency stop can be commanded by puffing out your cheek. The system is also capable of “learning,” which it does by analyzing the behavior of the driver.

While this may help out a lot of disabled people, I think that this is also an amazing feat for science. If we’ve reached a point in technology where we can create wheelchairs that are capable of reading our thoughts then who is to say that other mind-reading tools might not be available in the future?  All right, calling it mind-reading might be a bit of a stretch (it’s really just measuring our brainwaves), but that’s still incredible, whichever way you look at it. I wouldn’t mind sitting down in one of these chairs, if only to wave my hand forward and pretend that I’m a Jedi.

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