‘Very emotional’: Brain-scanning technology gives new powers to disabled children

This seems something from a future film: technology that allows users to control their environment only with ideas.

But for children with disabilities in Ontario, this is an emerging reality that is helping them to join the world around them by unprecedented ways.

For 10-year-old Irleen, which is non-verbal and limited mobility, it means that she can create a toy play music by thinking about clapping.

“Perhaps the best thing I have ever seen,” says his father, Jeff.

Out of honor of family’s safety concerns, CBC is stopping Iryne and her father’s last name from this story.

The technique known as a brain computer interface (BCI) depends on a black headset equipped with several circular sensors that hear electrical signals inside the head of Irelynn.

A professional therapist, Susanaah Van Dam and Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital at Toronto, Clinical BCI Program Team lead Susanaah Van Dame, says, “He has taught software to identify a special command idea.”

“So for Irelynn, she loves applause, she likes to clap, so this was the first command we thought we had worked together.”

Van Dame led the recent season, which was with Irilen at John McGivani Children’s Center in Windsor, Onts. The center, which provides services and care to disabled children, is the first in the province to train with equipment.

Last year ending last year, a $ 30 million donation from The Slate Family Foundation is helping to spread the technique beyond Holland Bloorview, which pioneered it.

Jodi Fisher, manager for vocational therapy and physiotherapy at McGagivani, says the training is in early stages, but it has been “very exciting” so far.

“They see a way that they control their environment (…) in such a way that they have never been able to do a lot of examples,” she says.

“It was possible that giving them a tool that they did not know.”

He said that he has worked with a boy for years, used technology to throw a ball to a machine – something that could be integrated into a group program, or even allowed him to play with his family in the future.

“It is very emotional, and we have seen the time and time again in different demos,” he said.

The technique made on decades research at Holland Bloorview is perfect. It takes some time for employees in McGivani gymnasium to secure the headset and many of its sensors at the right places on the irlane.

But Irelynn, wearing pigtail and a red summer dress, sits peacefully in its wheelchair. He has done so earlier.

“To achieve those signs for us, we need to make sure that each electrode is creating good contact with his skull,” Van Dame said.

“So we have to take the hair around. We have very few felt that are soaked in saline solution so that the salt helps with conductivity,” he said. “And once we know that the headset is well connected, we are able to move forward and are able to train the system when she wants to activate a toy.”

Current headsets were designed for adults, calling van dame, so they hope that they can improve technology.

But for Jeff, Irelynn’s father, the device has already opened its world. He was diagnosed with a rare genetic condition stxbp1 disorder when he was a child, he says.

“It just shows that children are more capable than what we really know,” he said.

McGivani’s therapy manager Jeff and Fisher said that this tool hopes them what technology can do for people with disabilities in the future.

“Who knows where it will go?” He said.