This study proposes a home care system (HCS) based on a brain-computer interface (BCI) with a smartphone. The HCS provides daily help to motor-disabled people when a caregiver is not present. The aim of the study is two-fold: (1) to develop a BCI-based home care system to help end-users control their household appliances, and (2) to assess whether the architecture of the HCS is easy for motor-disabled people to use. A motion-strip is used to evoke event-related potentials (ERPs) in the brain of the user, and the system immediately processes these potentials to decode the user’s intentions. The system, then, translates these intentions into application commands and sends them via Bluetooth to the user’s smartphone to make an emergency call or to execute the corresponding app to emit an infrared (IR) signal to control a household appliance. Fifteen healthy and seven motor-disabled subjects (including the one with ALS) participated in the experiment. The average online accuracy was 81.8% and 78.1%, respectively. Using component N2P3 to discriminate targets from nontargets can increase the efficiency of the system. Results showed that the system allows end-users to use smartphone apps as long as they are using their brain waves. More important, only one electrode O1 is required to measure EEG signals, giving the system good practical usability. The HCS can, thus, improve the autonomy and self-reliance of its end-users.
This study proposed an auditory stimulation protocol based on Shadowing Tasks to improve the sound-evoked potential in an EEG and the efficiency of an auditory brain–computer interface system. We use stories as auditory stimulation to enhance users’ motivation and presented the sound stimuli via headphones to enable the user to concentrate better on the keywords in the stories. The protocol presents target stimuli with an oddball P300 paradigm. To decline mental workload, we shift the usual Shadowing Tasks paradigm: Instead of loudly repeating the auditory target stimuli, we ask subjects to echo the target stimuli mentally as it occurs. Twenty-four healthy participants, not one of whom underwent a BCI use or training phase before the experimental procedure, ran twenty trials each. We analyzed the effect of the auditory stimulation based on the Shadowing Tasks theory with the performance of the auditory BCI system. We also evaluated the judgment effectiveness of the three ERPs components (N2P3, P300, and N200) from five chosen electrodes. The best average accuracy of post-analysis was 78.96%. Using component N2P3 to distinguish between target and non-target can improve the efficiency of the auditory BCI system and give it good practicality. We intend to persist in this study and involve the protocol in an aBCI-based home care system (HCS) for target patients to provide daily assistance.
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