The 2004 Scientific American 50 Award: Research Leaders - Robotics
From: Scientific American - 12/2004 - page 51

Jose del R. Millan 
Researcher, Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence,
Martigny, Switzerland 

Achieved progress toward a mind-controlled wheelchair.

Doctors call it being "locked in." Utterly paralyzed, tens of thousands of
people are islands of pure thought, able to perceive the world, to feel, to
dream, yet not able to communicate. For years, engineers and cognitive
scientists have worked to unlock them by building brain-computer interfaces.
Last year a team led by Spanish computer scientist Jose del R. Millan
unveiled software that finally makes practical the taking of
electroencephalogram readings through scalp electrodes. It can divine which
of three mental states a person is in. Each user chooses states that produce
distinguishable brain-wave patterns--say, doing arithmetic or imagining
moving the left hand--and trains the system in a few hour-long sessions.
These states are then used as "forward," "left" and "right" commands. As a
test, volunteers maneuvered a small robot around a model house. They set the
course, while the bot itself handled time-sensitive maneuvers such as
avoiding obstacles. A mind-controlled wheelchair is still years away, but it
is no longer an idea disconnected from reality. 


Photo caption: Scalp electrodes make readings of neural signals to control a
tabletop robot, a prelude to doing the same with a wheelchair.  

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D5CA6-D59B-118F-91DD83414B7F0000&pageNumber=5&catID=9
http://www.idiap.ch/multimodal_interaction.php?project=27
http://www.maia-project.org/