SIT Completes Move, Looks to Deepen Real-World Learning

It aims to foster closer collaboration with industry partners on research, innovation

- Shermaine Ang

In a lab at the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT), an information and communications technology graduate student is hooked up to a computer via a cap studded with electrodes. The cap is reading her brain signals as she imagines moving her hand in a certain direction and speed.

When the "mind reader" machine learning model wrongly predicts the student's hand motion, she demonstrates the correct motion to train it.

The aim is to eventually have stroke patients use such a machine to do "mental rehearsals" of moving their limbs, thereby helping them build brain plasticity, said Professor Vinod A. Prasad, director of the Infocomm Technology cluster at SIT.

This technology will be trialled with stroke survivors at Singapore General Hospital to guide them in active, instead of passive, rehabilitation. In this approach, physiotherapists help patients in gradually moving their hands until they recover their mobility.

This brain-computer interface system is one of the research projects being developed at the new Digital Health Innovation Lab in SIT's Punggol campus.

The campus, which has been fully operational since May with about 11,000 students and close to 1,300 staff, will officially launch on Sept 16.

SIT, Singapore's first university of applied learning, has completed the move to the new campus. It aims to apply learning to real-world practice and deepen collaboration with industry partners on research and innovation. Previously, SIT had six satellite campus locations.