Associate Prof. Natalie Mrachacz-Kersting and her research group received the 1st price of the International BCI (Brain-Computer-Interface) Award in Graz last week at the “7th Graz Brain-Computer Interface Conference 2017 - From Vision to Reality”, held from 18-22 September in Graz, Austria. Natalie was also one of the keynote speakers at this conference
Natalie says:
“Receiving this award is a big achievement for my group as I have been nominated to be amongst the top 10 labs (in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015) and amongst the top 12 labs (2016 and 2017) for six years in a row. No other BCI laboratory in the world has achieved this many nominations.
The work in my laboratory (that we do with my collaborators in London UK, Waterloo, Canada, and now for a new project also with Tuebingen, Germany) centers around developing a robust BCI system for the recovery of motor function in chronic and acute stroke patients. The award was given for incorporating a novel adaptive online BCI system able to detect attention shifts for both healthy and stroke patients into our BCI that we have been developing for the past six years. The title of the award project is: “Online adaptive brain-computer interface with attention variations” and the authors were: S. Aliakbaryhosseinabadi1, E. N. Kamavuako1, N. Jiang2, D. Farina3, N. Mrachacz-Kersting1
1 Center for Sensory-Motor Interaction, Department of Health Science and Technology, Aalborg University, DK-9220 Aalborg, Denmark
2 Department of Systems Design Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada
3 Imperial College London, London, UK
The latest work (for which we have received an Innovation Grant lead by Dr. Jakob Blicher, Aarhus University, Denmark) is to develop a BCI system for the replacement of lost arm function in patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). It is within this project that we have commenced new collaborations with Tuebingen, Germany”.
