REAL-TIME MICROCONTROLLER BASED BRAIN COMPUTER INTERFACE FOR MENTAL TASK CLASSIFICATIONS USING WIRELESS EEG SIGNALS FROM TWO CHANNELS

Rifai Chai, Gregory P. Hunter, Sai H. Ling and Hung T. Nguyen

Keywords

Biomedical electronic, biomedical signal processing, dataand signal acquisition, brain computer interface

Abstract

A brain computer interface (BCI) using electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain activities could provide severely disabled people with alternative means of control and communication. In a practical system, portability, low power and real-time operation are the keys requirements. This could be accomplished by using an embedded microcontroller based system. The main contribution of this paper shows the development of a real-time BCI prototype system to classify groups of mental tasks based on such a system. The relevant mental tasks used are mental arithmetic, figure rotation, letter composing, visual counting and eyes closed action. Moreover, the system uses a separate two channels only wireless EEG measurement module with the active positions at parietal and occipital lobes. The result shows the wireless EEG module has a good performance with a CMRR of more than 95dB. In addition, the size of the module is small (36x36 mm2 ) and current consumption is low enough to operate off a 3V coin cell battery. The mental tasks were classified using a feed-forward back- propagation artificial neural network (ANN) trained with the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. An accuracy of around 70% was achieved with bit rate at around 0.4 bits/trial for six subjects tested to select between three separate mental tasks.

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