Nose sniffing powered wheelchair

Your nostrils are an incredibly powerful tool for memory, and can even help you stop smoking, if you use them right way.

But researchers at the Weizmann Institute in Israel have developed one more use for your nose: powering a wheelchair. They have created a device that allows people with serious physical impairments to navigate a wheelchair or type out an email to a friend or family member.

No word yet on whether these wheelchairs will be able to go off-road like the ones developed earlier this year at MIT.

The unnamed technology uses a pressure sensor at the end of a nasal tube to detect the opening and closing of a person’s soft palette inside their nose. When that sensor is connected to a computer, that person can sniff to select letters on a screen to build words and sentences.

People of almost every level of physical impairment can operate this device, even handicapped people with artificial respirators. As lead researcher Noam Sobel explains to The Engineer, “With patients who are artificially respirated, our system has an addition of a small little pump that pressurizes the nose at three liters per minute.”

The most severely disabled patients took a minimum of 20 seconds to select a letter. Researchers found that the rate of selecting letters improved for most patients as they became more experienced with the device.

Researchers also built word comprehension software for the device, and as it becomes more skilled at predicting the words someone will use, that should also speed things up.

The system built for the lab was relatively inexpensive at $300. Researchers predict that like most other technologies, the price for this technology will drop precipitously once it goes on the commercial market.

Dhruv

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