Singapore, Singapore, September 02, 2009 –(PR.com)– Two teams of engineers from A*STAR’s Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) have won the Institution of Engineers Singapore (IES) Prestigious Engineering Achievement Award 2009 for their research and development work. The first team won it for ‘Advancing the Brain Computer Interface (BCI) technologies’ while the second team clinched the award for their research in `Unleashing Underutilized Spectrum for Sustainable Future Communications’.

“Researchers in Japan have developed a brain-machine interface (BMI) system that allows for control of a wheelchair using thought.

The system processes brain thought patterns and can turn them into left, right and forward movements of the wheelchair with a delay as short as one-thousandth of a second. That’s a vast improvement over other systems that can take as long as several seconds to analyze and react to the user’s thoughts.”

“The user focuses on a point onscreen and, as the point blinks, the headset can determine at which area of the screen the user is looking. For the wheelchair interface, a laser is used to scan for obstacles and the user is given options by way of a 3-D map on the computer screen. Although the wheelchair is limited to about two processed thought-commands per minute, the route is already planned into the chair’s navigation system, so there is not much need for more intense user input.”