Control your wheelchair by breathing

Wheelchairs and computer-operated breathing pads allow paralyzed people to access wheelchairs, access the Internet and write email.

Wheelchairs that control breathing will be a relief for those who are partially or wholly paralyzed. Image: brettmcarthur.com.

Inhalation depends on the coordination of the soft tissues at the back of the throat. Whenever people want to inhale, many nerve cells will send signals to the palate. These nerve cells remain active even when a person has a limb, limb or whole body.

National Geographic said that based on that fact, experts at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel invented a device controlled by inhalation. The device blows air through a horizontal transducer. As the user breathes, airflow is blocked. The device determines exactly when, how long it takes, how long it takes and how strong it is. Those parameters will be converted into electrical signals and transmitted to many wheelchair equipment, computers.

In the tests, some healthy and paralyzed patients rode electric wheelchairs along a 35-meter-long pathway by combining exhaling and inhalation.

Breaths can also help users type text, play simple games and write e-mails through a mouse cursor on the screen. The pointer moves one character at a time. Whenever it arrives at a character, the character is highlighted so that the user makes the decision to choose or quit. The movement speed of the cursor is 6.7 seconds / liter. By accurately breathing, paralyzed people can "write" one character per minute. To speed up writing, the team used a predictive software - like software that mobile phone companies are using.

However, the wheelchair control device is not ideal for all paralytic patients, because even paralyzed people have difficulty controlling the palate to produce the desired breath. In the whole experiment, about 25% of normal volunteers had trouble breathing. A 64-year-old man with paralyzed body can not control his breath after practicing every day for two months.

'Even so, our equipment will help a lot of people around the world. We found a low-tech solution to solve a problem that most scientists are trying to solve with high technology, " said Noam Sobel, a member of the research team.