Date released: June 17, 2003
AMA continues its involvement in assistive technology for the severely handicapped. In July, principal and Chief Operations Officer, Bob MacDonald, with input from Phil Zeman and Nigel Livingstone of the University of Victoria Assistive Technology team will be presenting the current status of the alpha-wave communications experiments with ALS patients to a group of Engineers at the University of Cambridge under the direction of Dr. Marcus Tomalin of Downing College.
As Phil explains, the ultimate objective is to enable non-intrusive assisted communications between locked-in patients (those who have lost control of direct muscle movements) and controllable devices such as computers. AMA's initial funding of this project in 1999-2002 has resulted in some remarkable findings in analysis of the human brainwave signals. Bill Hook, retired communications engineer at UVIC and the project manager of the current efforts described the ability as equivalent to finding a voluntary signal as pure as that coming from a cell-phone in the brain.
For more information see: www.rideforlife.com
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