A successful experiment has demonstrated the efficacy of newly developed mind-control wheelchairs in helping paralysis patients navigate through obstacles.

The study, published within the journal iScience, found the non-invasive wheelchair control allowed paralyzed patients to guide themselves through an obstacle course.

The quadriplegic participants were placed on an electrode cap that allowed them to regulate the wheelchair. Once the cap was on, the patients needed to concentrate on moving certain body parts they not controlled just like the hands and legs.

“This intent will likely be translated into the actual commands for the motors of the wheelchair that may make the wheels move at different speeds in order that if one is quicker than the opposite, then it would turn into that in the wrong way,” senior researcher, José del R. Millán, a professor of neurology and chair of electrical and computer engineering on the University of Texas at Austin, said, reported USNews. “So, if the suitable is quicker than the left, it would robotically turn toward the left and the opposite way around.”

Two of the three volunteers were in a position to mind-control the wheelchair with increasing accuracy because the training progressed. To maneuver toward the suitable, volunteers needed to take into consideration moving each legs, while to maneuver the wheelchair toward the left, volunteers needed to take into consideration moving each hands.

Currently, patients need to undergo an operation to gain mind control of a wheelchair. This recent non-invasive method, which requires no such surgery, can prove revolutionary.

“This might be the primary small study to attain quite good success without having to enter the brain,” Abbey Sawyer, a postdoctoral researcher within the Abilities Research Center on the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in Latest York City, told USNews.

“There are rather more invasive approaches that are entering safety and feasibility stages of human trials at this point, but that is one among the primary and possibly one of the vital successful of a noninvasive approach,” Sawyer, who was not a part of the study, added.

The three participants were trained 3 times every week for 2 to 5 months. Over the course of the training, two participants showed exceptional progress, with accuracy increasing to 95% and 98% individually from the initial 43%-55%.

“The primary point of the paper is that if we train people sufficiently long, they will achieve a certain level of control of a classy device like these brain-controlled wheelchairs,” Millán noted.

Nonetheless, business use of such mind-controlled wheelchairs remains to be a great distance from materializing.

“There is no pragmatic, adaptive way for people to do that themselves, and the training is kind of intensive, so I do not think it’s quite ready for prime time,” Dr. Anthony Ritaccio, a professor of neurology on the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla, said. “Persons are still working to make it easy and applicable, because otherwise, why wouldn’t it take many years? It will have been in the marketplace already.”