Brain-controlled computer switches on in a heartbeat

Physically disabled people must be able to switch on brain-computer interfaces without external help if the futuristic devices are to give them greater freedoms, say researchers beginning to study the little-addressed problem.

Brain computer interfaces (BCI) allow incapacitated people to control robotic limbs, steer wheelchairs, type messages, and even walk through a virtual worlds using their brain activity instead of a physical control.

Typically, such machines use an EEG machine to sense a person's brain waves via electrodes in a skullcap.

But the newfound freedoms offered by these interfaces rely on having someone around to boot up the equipment first. So Reinhold Scherer at Graz University of Technology, Austria, and colleagues have started testing ideas that could solve this problem for EEG-based interfaces.

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