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WHEN Jordan Nguyen leapt off a wobbly diving board, hit his head on the bottom of the pool, and spent 24 hours paralysed, he vowed to focus his budding research career on helping people with disabilities.
Eight years later, he has invented a mind-controlled wheelchair that can navigate via camera, steer away from obstacles using an artificial intelligence system, and can be directed via electrical energy from the brain.
“The accident changed my perspective on life, it made me thankful for every day I have,” Mr Nguyen said.
“So at UTS (University of Technology, Sydney), I started moving all of my electives towards medical science, understanding neuroscience, then robotics, then artificial intelligence and biomedical instrumentation.
“It was only as I learned all the skills necessary, and kept improving and optimising my designs, that I realised [a mind-controlled wheelchair] was possible,” he said.
The wheelchair is designed for people with severe disability, such as locked-in syndrome.
The user wears a headband – subtle enough to be worn under a beanie – that picks up the brain’s electrical activity.
An artificial intelligence program focuses on changes in thoughts, which prompt the wheelchair to move.
“An example would be to focus on an Rubik cube, and imagine a Rubik cube every time you want to go to the right. My programs can tell the difference, so when you are thinking about a Rubik cube, you can go right.”
Mr Nguyen has trialled the wheelchair on people with mid-range quadriplegia, who guided it through a moving obstacle course. He fine-tuned it to the point that people can work out how to use it in 10 minutes.
“They also had to avoid people who were moving, and that was where the wheelchair really took over,” he said.
“The person is guiding the wheelchair, and the wheelchair does the finer steering and manoeuvring.”
Jordan Nguyen sits in the wheelchair he invented. Picture Craig Greenhill
There is much excitement about Mr Nguyen’s invention within the disability community, but it is still too expensive to produce and sell.
His next aim is to make the chair affordable.
“Something that we will see as being commercial viable,” he said. “I’m in the process of setting up the legal and accounting aspects of the business, and hopefully we will have a prototype in the next few years.”
Meanwhile, Mr Nguyen is adapting the technology to prosthetic limbs.
“It would be using the signals that the brain sends to the muscles,” he said.
The Sunday Telegraph, in partnership with the Westpac Bicentennial Foundation, presents Faces of the Future — a five-part series celebrating young Australians shaping our future in the fields of science, technology, innovation and forging ties with Asia.
Westpac this year launched a scholarship fund investing $100 million to support 100 scholarships a year, forever.
