From a toy car remotely controlled with the mind to a game of archery that uses brain waves, the National Science Council’s “2011 Science Season: Technologies of the Future,” which opens next month, will give visitors an eyeful of new technologies.
The council’s free exhibition will be held at National Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall for six weeks, beginning on Oct. 14.
Four sections — life, education, medical care and exploration — will be featured at the show, whose theme this year is “The Future.”
At a press conference yesterday, exhibition project director and National Central University (NCU) Department of Mechanical Engineering professor Shy Sheng-yang (施聖洋) said: “The ‘Future Exploration: Brain Wave World’ section focuses on how our present limited technologies can lead us to explore unknown domains.”
Hopefully, visitors could explore their imagination and change their expectations of the future after visiting the exhibition, Shy said.
The section will include virtual-reality journeys underwater and in outer space, as well as explorations of the human brain.
Combining electronics with neurology, NCU Department of Electrical Engineering professor Shyu Kuo-kai (徐國鎧) and Institute of Brain Science associate professor Lee Po-lei’s (李柏磊) team developed a brain-computer interface that allows a user to control electrical appliances via a helmet that monitors brain wave signals from the visual cortex.
Sitting in front of a monitor showing the image seen from a video recorder set up on a remote control toy car, a demonstrator wearing the device made the car move in different directions as she focused her mind on the four direction panels next to the monitor.
Shyu said the functions could be made more complex to include communication and the remote control of household appliances, which could be helpful to people with physical impairments.
National Chiao Tung University’s Brain Research Center associate director Chen Chih-an’s (陳世安) team developed another light-weight portable cap device that monitors brain waves in the frontal lobe, which is in charge of logical thinking, planning and reasoning.
In contrast to traditional electroencephalography tests and magnetoencephalography brain imaging systems, the new device — known as MINDO — has the advantage of being very mobile, which allows brain monitoring to continue in different conditions, such as sleeping, driving or even during exercise, Chen said.
Chen said the signals are sent by Bluetooth to smartphones, with applications that include monitoring a driver’s drowsiness.
The device has been integrated into an archery game, with the user focusing the mind on the target, Chen said, adding that the game could help in the treatment of children with hyperkinetic disorder.
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