'Very emotional': Brain-scanning tech gives kids with disabilities new powers
CBC
It sounds like something from a futuristic film: Technology that allows users to control their environment with mere thoughts.
But for kids with disabilities in Ontario, it's an emerging reality that's helping them connect with the world around them in unprecedented ways.
For 10-year-old Irelynn, who's non-verbal and has limited mobility, it means she can make a toy play music just by thinking about clapping.
"Probably the best thing I've ever seen," says her dad, Jeff.
Out of respect for the family's safety concerns, CBC is withholding Irelynn and her father's last name from this story.
The technology, known as brain computer interface (BCI), relies on a black headset equipped with several circular sensors that listen to electrical signals inside Irelynn's head.
"She has taught software to recognize a particular command thought," says Susannah Van Damme, an occupational therapist and the team lead of the clinical BCI program at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto.
"So for Irelynn, she loves applause, she loves clapping, so that was the first command thought that we worked with."
Van Damme led the recent session with Irelynn at the John McGivney Children's Centre in Windsor, Ont. The centre, which provides services and care to local kids with disabilities, is among the first in the province to train with the tool.
A $30 million donation from the Slaight Family Foundation late last year is helping spread the technology beyond Holland Bloorview, which pioneered it.
Jodi Fischer, manager for occupational therapy and physiotherapy at McGivney, says the training is in the early stages, but that it's been "very exciting" so far.
"They see a way that they get to control their environment […] in a way that they've never been able to do in lots of instances," she says.
"It's giving them a tool that they didn't know was possible."
She said one boy she's worked with for years used the technology to make a machine throw a ball — something that could be integrated into a group program, or even allow him to play with his family in the future.
