Design of assistive wheelchair system directly steered by human thoughts

Integration of brain-computer interface (BCI) technique and assistive device is one of chief and promising applications of BCI system. With BCI technique, people with disabilities do not have to communicate with external environment through traditional and natural pathways like peripheral nerves and muscles, and could achieve it only by their brain activities. In this paper, we designed an electroencephalogram (EEG)-based wheelchair which can be steered by users' own thoughts without any other involvements. We evaluated the feasibility of BCI-based wheelchair in terms of accuracies and real-world testing. The results demonstrate that our BCI wheelchair is of good performance not only in accuracy, but also in practical running testing in a real environment. This fact implies that people can steer wheelchair only by their thoughts, and may have a potential perspective in daily application for disabled people.