LET THE MIND-CONTROL GAMES BEGIN!

The Cybathlon competition boosts brain-computer interface power among the paralysed

- OLIVER WHANG

Training on new technology being developed by Dr Damien Coyle's company, NeuroCONCISE, at the University of Bath in England.

Owen Collumb was paralysed in 1993, when he was 21 years old. A tyre on his motorbike blew out and he fell into a ravine, breaking a single bone in his spine. When he recovered, he couldn't move his legs and could control only the biceps in his arms, meaning that he could lift his hands but, to put them down, he had to twist his shoulders and let gravity unbend his elbows.

He spent years in an assisted living home before petitioning to move to his own place in Dublin, with the help of home aides. Living alone was liberating; he could choose what he ate and when he woke in the morning. He began working multiple jobs for foundations and advocating for people with disabilities.

One of his assistants, Sylwia Filipiek, a Polish immigrant to Ireland, had been employed at a printing factory. She had no experience with home care and struggled to help Collumb into his wheelchair at first. But, over the years, they learned how to work together, and grew close.

In the summer of 2024, Collumb and Filipiek flew to Bath, England, to train for the Cybathlon, an international competition run every four years to encourage the development of assistive technologies.

The competition, hosted in Switzerland by the university ETH Zurich, consists of eight races for teams and their pilots (which is what the primary competitors, with varying disabilities, are called), each targeting different innovations, such as arm prostheses, leg prostheses and vision assistance.

Each race consists of remote tasks that are supposed to simulate everyday life for the pilots: walking across a room, picking up a grocery bag, throwing a ball. One of Cybathlon's founders, Roland Sigrist, compared it to Formula One.