Sharjah: Students from the American University of Sharjah (AUS) College of Engineering have developed a mobile solution that can help paralysed patients communicate using a mobile app and a brain/computer interface.
This project recently won first place at the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2014 UAE, and the team will now participate in the Pan Arab Semi-finals to be held in Qatar later this month. The AUS team beat 16 other projects from seven universities in the UAE
The AUS student team — Nada Ali Obaid, Aya Bilal Ali, Rana Omar Mahmoud and Mohammad Al Nabtiti — developed a smartphone app called iConnect that can determine the patients’ thoughts and feelings by reading brain signals.
The student researchers developed a set of commands that would allow patients to convey their needs such as hunger, thirst or whether they are in pain.
The team extended the scope of the project to link the monitoring and classification system to a mobile app so that a doctor or a guardian can monitor a patient’s feelings of hunger or pain via their smartphones. It can also send signals to machines such as wheelchairs to help the patient move.
“Our app will enable the voice of silenced patients to be heard by their guardians and improve the quality of their life. It feels great to win the Imagine Cup competition, especially after a year of hard work, on such an important project,” said Aya.
