The portable P300 dialing system based on tablet and Emotiv Epoc headset

Abstract

A Brain-computer interface (BCI) is a novel communication system that translates brain signals into a control signal. Now with the appearance of the commercial EEG headsets and mobile smart platforms (tablet, smartphone), it is possible to develop the mobile BCI system, which can greatly improve the life quality of patients suffering from motor disease, such as amyotrophic lateral scleroses (ALS), multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy and head trauma. This study adopted a 14-channel Emotiv EPOC headset and Microsoft surface pro 3 to realize a dialing system, which was represented by 4×3 matrices of alphanumeric characters. The performance of the online portable dialing system based on P300 is satisfying. The average classification accuracy reaches 88.75±10.57% in lab and 73.75±16.94% in metro, while the information transfer rate (ITR) reaches 7.17±1.80 and 5.05±2.17 bits/min respectively. This means the commercial EEG headset and tablet has good prospect in developing real time BCI system in realistic environments.

Validation of low-cost wireless EEG system for measuring event-related potentials

“…For each participant, epoched data comprising target and non-target trials were averaged separately to create ERP waveforms. Electrodes were chosen at channel P7 P8 O1 and O2 to observe in the experiment, due to the visual cortex is located in the occipital lobe of the brain [11,25]. P300 peak latency was assessed between 250 ms to 550 ms, N200 peak latency was assessed within 160 ms to 300 ms, using the approach described in the literature [29].…”

“…The advantageous features of these devices are low-cost, wireless and portable. Researchers were gained interests in such devices as their potential to perform comparable EEG measurement compared with the medical grade EEG systems inside and outside the laboratory [10][11][12].…”

“…Although there has been an increase in the use of low-cost EEG devices in research applications, the question of measured EEG quality still remains. The Emotiv EPOC has been given the most attention in the literature compared to other wireless EEG systems [11,[15][16][17][18][19][20].…”

“…It was necessary to average a large number of trials to obtain a reliable P300 signal. Tong et al [11] came up with a similar P300 based dialing BCI system on a tablet and used the Emotiv EPOC to detect P300 signals. The system used 4x3 matrices of alphanumeric characters that enabled users to spell a phone number.…”

Modernization, wealth and the emergence of strong alpha oscillations in the human EEG

“…The EEG recordings were carried out using the Emotiv EPOC device. While the device has been shown to have similar results to more expensive clinical grade systems [17][18][19][20][21], we nonetheless performed validations by comparing results to simultaneous recordings from the clinical grade Neuroscan device along multiple dimensions with highly correlated results [16]. Survey methodology and sampling are described in more detail in a companion paper [16].…”