We present the evaluation of two well-known, low-cost consumer-grade EEG devices: the Emotiv EPOC and the Neurosky MindWave. Problems with using the consumer-grade EEG devices (BCI illiteracy, poor technical characteristics, and adverse EEG artefacts) are discussed. The experimental evaluation of the devices, performed with 10 subjects asked to perform concentration/relaxation and blinking recognition tasks, is given. The results of statistical analysis show that both devices exhibit high variability and non-normality of attention and meditation data, which makes each of them difficult to use as an input to control tasks. BCI illiteracy may be a significant problem, as well as setting up of the proper environment of the experiment. The results of blinking recognition show that using the Neurosky device means recognition accuracy is less than 50%, while the Emotiv device has achieved a recognition accuracy of more than 75%; for tasks that require concentration and relaxation of subjects, the Emotiv EPOC device has performed better (as measured by the recognition accuracy) by ∼9%. Therefore, the Emotiv EPOC device may be more suitable for control tasks using the attention/meditation level or eye blinking than the Neurosky MindWave device.

Automatic human activity recognition systems aim to capture the state of the user and its environment by exploiting heterogeneous sensors attached to the subject's body and permit continuous monitoring of numerous physiological signals reflecting the state of human actions. Successful identification of human activities can be immensely useful in healthcare applications for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), for automatic and intelligent activity monitoring systems developed for elderly and disabled people. In this paper, we propose the method for activity recognition and subject identification based on random projections from high-dimensional feature space to low-dimensional projection space, where the classes are separated using the Jaccard distance between probability density functions of projected data. Two HAR domain tasks are considered: activity identification and subject identification. The experimental results using the proposed method with Human Activity Dataset (HAD) data are presented.

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The paper presents a novel extension of the Huang's Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) method, called BoostEMD, that allows calculating higher order Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) that capture higher frequency empirical mode oscillations (empiquencies) in the EMG (electromyography) data. We describe the use of the second order IMFs for denoising physical action EMG signals.We demonstrate the efficiency of denoising by performing classification of EMG data before and after application of the denoising procedure as well as by evaluating properties of the extracted noise signal.