Honda Motor with the Japanese government-affiliated Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International and precision equipment maker Shimadzu, has co-developed a brain machine interface (BMI) system that allows a person to control a robot through thought alone.

Honda said — “The BMI system uses statistical processing of the complex information to distinguish brain activities with high precision without any physical motion.”

In 2006 they managed to get a robotic hand to move by analyzing brain activity using a large magnetic resonance imaging scanner like that found in hospitals.

The latest work is a step more advanced and measures the electrical activity in a person’s brain using electroencephalography and blood flow within the brain using near-infrared spectroscopy to produce data that is then interpreted into control information. It requires no physical movement.