Real-time man-machine interface and control using deliberate eye blink

Abstract

There has been a tremendous growth in the field of neural controlled robotic systems having utility limited not only to physically challenged but also for improving performance of healthy users. In this work, real-time EEG signal is acquired for deliberate eye blink action in MATLAB and Independent Component Analysis decomposition is done and corresponding epochs are extracted. The deliberate action shows significant rise in the event related potential from 0 µV to 175.1 µV at frontal channel AF3. Scalp maps also show that frontal regions are activated at 3 Hz and 10 Hz thus, representing the activation of delta band power (0-4 Hz) and alpha band power (8-13 Hz). The component activation is used to generate an 'active high' output during deliberate eye blinking to play an audio file. This reflects the use of EEG as a trigger in developing more intuitive brain-computer interfaces in real-time scenario.