Student creates headset to help people communicate

After watching his grandmother forgetting things and struggle with simple daily tasks, he started thinking about potential solutions.

“I couldn’t take care of her because I didn’t know what she was trying to tell me. If only I could know what she’s thinking. If only I could read her thoughts”, he recalled.

So the student took action. He spent three years doing research and tests. Eventually, he came up with a wireless, mobile headset that allows people who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease and other similar conditions to communicate to others their desire to rest, read, walk or eat.

This system has 14 different electrodes that track different brain waves and then reproduces them in different colours on a computer or on a mobile app. When Grant combines the brain waves with his algorithms, he can separate out these four desires.

The young man lives near the UC Irvine Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders. With the advice from a math professor, and learned more data and complex algorithms. Then he started testing theories using his own brain waves.

The inventor was awarded a $10,000 Davidson Fellows Scholarship. His goal now is to further develop his gadget and make it available to many people as possible, even finding a way to get his innovation to senior centres.

Adapted from: https://bit.ly/2QZdyLP