There’s something eerie and amazing about the way that Tom Coleman travels in his wheelchair. You see, Tom isn’t paralyzed and yet he’s not using his body to control his movement. He thinks about saying commands to his chair…and then the chair moves. Tom and Michael Callahan are the founders of Ambient Corporation, makers of the Audeo, a device which reads nerve impulses in the neck to help people speak and even control an electronic wheelchair. Designed to help people suffering from diseases like ALS which erode muscle control over time, Audeo has received numerous awards. Audeo Basic, the system which allows someone to speak only using nerve signals, is already available on a limited basis for trials. Check out Callahan’s presentation of how audeo can be used with cell phones, and video of Coleman in the chair after the break.

This sort of “nerve reading” technology isn’t unique. We’ve seen Braingate use motor neuron signals in the brain to move a wheelchair and computer cursor. Cyberdyne uses surface sensors to detect muscle commands to help guide the movements of their HAL exoskeleton. Audeo is somewhat of a blend of the two. It doesn’t require you to have gold wires in your brain, like Braingate, but it can control remote objects, and it reads surface signals, like HAL, but for both motor movements and language. Taken as a group, we’re seeing an amazing trend in being able to read nerve signals like computer commands. Whether those commands allow us to talk, roll, or lift heavy objects, is just marketing. As nerve signal reading becomes more sophisticated, we’ll see an increase in the range of devices you can control, and the number of disabilities that can be overcome with the technology.

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