Students of the University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering (UVCE) have bagged the Analog Devices Anveshan-2012 award for their prototype ‘Brain Controlled Bionic Ear’ (BCBE).
Third-year students of Computer Science and Electronics and Communication - Akshay Kumar B U, Gowrishankar A and Samhitha M R - who worked under the guidance of B K Venugopal, won a cash prize of `1.1 lakh and certificates.
According to the students, the brain can be in any one of the four states - sleep, alert, relaxed or meditation.
The transition from one state to the other can be achieved through the BCBE device which works on the idea of mapping audio signals of corresponding frequencies.
The brain generates signals corresponding to its state. Thus, when mapped with frequencies of other states, the brain goes into a new state from the present state. This interface device to the brain can be used to get a patient back to normal from the anaesthetic state.
“Sleepy drivers can use this to stay alert. This also filters unwanted noise signals in any range of frequencies and has many more exciting applications,” the students said.
Samhitha said work on the device started much before Anveshan.
“As of now, we have shown that something like this can be done. We want to work on this for another year as part of our final-year project,” she said.
This project was done as part of Anveshan 2012, which aimed at designing an innovative technological solution to address growing system level challenges using ADI components.
The competition saw 180 entries from across the country.