Desarrollo de una BCI utilizando el potencial P300 y la diadema Mindwave®

Abstract

In this paper we propose a recording, processing and classification scheme for a spelling Brain-Computer Interface application based on the P300 potential and the electroencephalography (EEG) device Mindwave-NeuroSky®; this device has only one EEG recording channel and is currently the most affordable in the market for this purpose. Open access software Openvibe was chosen for signal recording, and Matlab scripts were written for signal analysis and classification, the latter being based on Linear Discrimant Analysis (LDA). Five test subjects were exposed to several spelling sessions each, in which different acquisition and stimulation parameters were varied to evaluate the effects in character identification. Those parameters were the number of repetitions of the stimulation sequence of the speller character matrix (r=8, 12), the type of character sequence (chosen randomly of beforehand), and the EEG recording site (Pz or Oz). The subjects achieved, an average performance of 45% correct row and column identifications. In comparison, a very recent work in which 64 EEG channels were acquired, and a complex classification and feature extraction scheme was used, they achieved an average of 90.4% correct character identifications. The MindWave-Neurosky® headset was not designed for application in BCI systems. However, by looking at the results in this work, its application for BCI it seems feasible when thinking of combining the proposed approach with some word prediction scheme based on the context of the spelled phrase.