Brain Chair: Helps Gain Lost Mobility With Your Brain Waves

Soham Ganatra has sympathy for paralysed people and has done something constructive about it. Seeing them lose their mobility and having to depend on other people for almost everything, which in turn, seriously hampers the quality of their life, made him come up with an innovative wheelchair. He told Networked India, “This problem of disabled people has really motivated us to do the project”

The ‘project’ he is referring to is a ‘Brain Chair’, which is a wheelchair that disabled people can move around at will, by just blinking! He and his team started work on this in June last year, and made the low cost wheelchair. He explained,

By the time we were done with the chair, we started our work on brain waves. This was a bit difficult at first – understanding all the medical terms related to brain waves, but we got used to it. Simultaneously we had also started working on the algorithm to detect brain waves and write code for the same.”

He added, “We faced some glitches in the software, which we got rid of in due course by making constant changes to our code. The next big thing was to actually make the wheelchair move with brain waves. We did the sensor interfacing to our code and connected all the circuitry required to move the wheelchair, and after a week of hard work voila… the wheelchair was actually moving just with the help of brain waves.”

Soham has got great feedback from patients about this wheelchair. Not to mention positive support from doctors too. This has “further motivated me to make this project into a product. The most satisfying moment is the smile and surprise on people’s faces, when they see the wheelchair actually moving, with just their brain waves”, he added.

He and his team of two –  Sunny Modi and Priyank Satra – are all in the final year of their engineering course at the KJ Somaiya College of Engineering in Mumbai. They represented India at Maker Faire in May this year and won three editor choice award tags for their innovative product, which was proudly advertised by their college on their Facebook page.

They sure are making waves of a different kind as well!

Written for Ericsson's blog.