Researchers Are Working on a Smart Home That You Can Control with Your Mind

A researcher named Eda Akman Aydin and her team from Gazi University in Turkey are currently working on creating a special kind of smart home, one that can be controlled using thoughts. The project is based on an EEG cap that can detect a specific brain wave activity named P300, which is associated with performing tasks. The team gathered five volunteers and showed them a series of images depicting several smart home tasks. The volunteers were asked to think about what task they wanted to complete, such as turning on a TV or an appliance.

You could say that the testing session was a success, as all volunteers were able to control several smart home aspects using the power of their minds. The system was able to detect the correct P300 signal with a 95% accuracy after just five flashes of the same image, and two of the test subjects reported a 100% success rate. Apart from an EEG cap, there are other ways to control a home using thoughts, as proven by Takeshi Ogawafrom the Advanced Telecommunication Research Institute in Kyoto, Japan.

He is currently working on a more intricate solution called functional near-infrared spectroscopy, which measures light as it passes through blood vessels in order to determine what areas of the brain are using oxygen at a given time. However, these changes in blood to the brain don’t happen instantly, which is why the system responds to input with a 20-second delay right now. Still, with a success rate of 80%, this alternative hands-free home system is quite promising.

Thank you TechSpot for providing us with this information.