Students from the "Neuron” Neuroinformatics student research club are working on a mobile application. It is intended to enable the elderly and disabled people to make phone calls using a brain-computer interface. Their project received a grant under the 5th edition of the Student Activity Fund program.

The list of student research clubs at the Faculty of Information and Communication Technology has been thus extended with a new one – welcome. The "Neuron” Neuroinformatics Club, supervised by Michał Kędziora, PhD from the Department of Applied Computer Science sets himself ambitious tasks.

– We use human brain activity (EEG) analysis in our projects. With the help of devices such as the brain-computer interface, we read the user's brain activity, which is then analysed using artificial intelligence algorithms – explains Michał Skrzypa, president of the Neuron club.

The project and the club originated from Neurofiszka – an application supporting the process of learning foreign languages, which is based on brain activity analysis and predicts whether the user knows a given word in English.

The club is currently working on such projects as: playing tic-tac-toe with your mind, drawing with your mind, and using the keyboard with your mind.

Recently, young scientists from Neuron received a grant as part of the 5th edition of the Student Activity Fund program.

– The grant will be used to implement a project named „Feasibility study of controlling a mobile application by elderly and disabled people with limited mobility using the brain-computer interface", and more precisely for the purchase of more professional equipment for EEG (brain-computer interface) research – says Michał Skrzypa. – This equipment will help us analyse brain waves more precisely and develop more effective solutions.

As part of the project, initiated and led by Bogusława Tlołka, students from Neuron also plan to organize a workshop open to the citizens of Wrocław. – We will present the research results and offer a possibility to test our application – announces the president of the Club. He also explains how the tool developed in the Club will work in practice: – Our application is designed to enable elderly and disabled people to make phone calls by controlling the brain-computer interface. As a result, users who have difficulty using traditional mobile devices will be able to call selected contacts using brainwaves. Our app also reduces the digital exclusion that older and disabled people often face.