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Thinking cap - concentrate hard and the subject can control the computer - without lifting a finger.
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 BI is the fruit of a collaboration between the European Commission's Joint Research Centre at Ispra, Helsinki University of Technology, Fase Sistemi and the Santa Lucia neurological hospital. It relies on the fact that different types of activity are controlled by different parts of the brain. It can already reliably distinguish three different actions which can be chosen by the user.
"The idea is to enable people to communicate through conscious control of their thoughts," says project co-ordinator José del R Millán of the JRC's Institute for Systems, Informatics and Safety (ISIS). "If you concentrate on a single task and keep it in your mind for a few seconds, the system will recognise it as different from other tasks. We have developed a portable unit which picks up electrical signals from the brain, processes them digitally and sends them to a neural network. This recognises the task and transforms it into an action such as typing on a keyboard, playing a computer game or steering a wheelchair."
Voice for all
At present, ABI can reliably distinguish three mental tasks chosen by the user - for example, relaxing, imagining moving a hand, visualising a rotating cube, or mental arithmetic. Cognitive or motor-related tasks of this kind activate the outer part of the cortex, whose electrical fields can be picked up relatively easily with scalp electrodes.
Each user chooses three tasks, and trains the machine to recognise them. "We want the system to work as naturally as possible, with the user in total control, Millán stresses. "But speed is less important than correct interpretation. If the machine is slow to respond, this tells the user to concentrate harder."
The goal of the Esprit project(1), which ends in September 2001, is to give physically disabled people who cannot speak a chance to take part in the Information Society.
(1) Esprit project 28193 - Adaptive Brain Interfaces (ABI).
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IST 2000 
