El ecuatoriano es el mentalizador de un proyecto para perfeccionar una silla de ruedas movida con la mente. Viajará a Alemania para medirse con los ganadores de otras regiones.
Ecuadorian Carlos Abad, who together with a team developed a prototype of a mind-controlled wheelchair, in April 2022.
Ecuadorian Carlos Abad won the Falling Walls Lab 2023 innovation contest, organized by the German Academic Exchange Service.
Abad reached the final for his project to perfect a wheelchair moved with the mind.
“When I saw that I won the innovation regional to go to the world championships in Germany, I could not process it and I just broke down in tears… after so much effort to achieve it on behalf of all of Ecuador,” said Abad after learning of the judges’ decision.
The contest
The regional final took place in Colombia, on May 11. Twelve candidates from Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela participated.
After winning the contest, he will travel to Germany to face leaders from other regions, on November 7, 2023.
The Ecuadorian will now seek to ” invest in research to improve the prototype and expand it to all the necessary prostheses and mass-produce them to reduce the cost as much as possible and thus reach many more people.”
Revolutionary wheelchair
Abad is the mentalizer of a project through which, just by thinking of a color, an avant-garde prototype of a wheelchair moves with the mind.
The Ecuadorian maintains that the chair already “has a couple of improvements” in relation to the prototype presented in 2022.
The low-cost prototype was designed for a year, where thoughts make it move thanks to a headband -placed on the user’s forehead- that collects information from the brain and sends it to a controller (small computer), which processes the data.
“It has a delay of exactly one second in receiving and sending the information,” explained Abad, who is part of the team that has developed this prototype.
The particularity of this model over others is “the treatment and processing of signals” to move the chair -with thoughts in certain colors- forward, backward, right and left, and not just to two sides, Abad specified when presenting the project.
Likewise, the chair shows the versatility of the BCI (Brain Control Interface) interfaces to generate new technologies when controlled by a microprocessor.
