The motor and aesthetic function that prostheses provide to a person who is missing one of his or her limbs helps considerably to improve his or her quality of life. But what would happen if we were able to control the movement of these devices by thought?
Researchers at the Centro Universitario de la Defensa (CUD) at the General Air Academy (AGA) have developed a technology that allows for mind-controlled prosthetic arms or legs that will help the individual to stand up. The applications offered by this system include the clinical sector, the security industry and the defense industry. This new device can be applied to prosthetic hands, arms or legs in standing and walking, among others. It can also be used to control several machines while both hands are occupied simultaneously. It can even be used by the elderly or quadriplegics who, due to their lack of autonomy, may find it useful to obtain automatic control of their home.
This application has been presented as a thesis entitled Brain Computer Interface System focused on the user, defended by Germán Rodríguez, director of the CUD, and co-directed by Joaquín Roca and Pedro J. García-Laencina, director and professor of the CUD, respectively. The work has received European Quality Mention and has been published in numerous scientific journals of high research prestige, such as the International Journal of Neural Systems, one of the five most relevant international journals in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
The directors of the thesis explain that the objective has been “to create a system that adapts specifically to each user in order to operate more efficiently, with a lower error rate, and consequently requiring less effort in the initial design stage”. According to García-Laencina, intelligent signal processing algorithms have been developed with very low computational costs.