Abstract
This study proposes a home care system (HCS) based on a brain-computer interface (BCI) with a smartphone. The HCS provides daily help to motor-disabled people when a caregiver is not present. The aim of the study is two-fold: (1) to develop a BCI-based home care system to help end-users control their household appliances, and (2) to assess whether the architecture of the HCS is easy for motor-disabled people to use. A motion-strip is used to evoke event-related potentials (ERPs) in the brain of the user, and the system immediately processes these potentials to decode the user's intentions. The system, then, translates these intentions into application commands and sends them via Bluetooth to the user's smartphone to make an emergency call or to execute the corresponding app to emit an infrared (IR) signal to control a household appliance. Fifteen healthy and seven motor-disabled subjects (including the one with ALS) participated in the experiment. The average online accuracy was 81.8% and 78.1%, respectively. Using component N2P3 to discriminate targets from nontargets can increase the efficiency of the system. Results showed that the system allows end-users to use smartphone apps as long as they are using their brain waves. More important, only one electrode O1 is required to measure EEG signals, giving the system good practical usability. The HCS can, thus, improve the autonomy and self-reliance of its end-users.
Highlights
Individuals with locked-in syndrome (LIS), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), spinal cord injury, and congenital or accidental nerve injury may experience serious obstacles in developing motor skills in their limbs, yet most of them have normal brain function [1,2,3]
The participants could ask to stop the procedure at any time, no one did. e system used the N2P3 component to interpret the output of the EEG online
To find the optimal solution, we analyzed the features of event-related potentials (ERPs) components N200, P300, and N2P3 of all users offline. e experimental results were analyzed as follows
Summary
Individuals with locked-in syndrome (LIS), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), spinal cord injury, and congenital or accidental nerve injury may experience serious obstacles in developing motor skills in their limbs, yet most of them have normal brain function [1,2,3]. When they cannot speak clearly, the demands they are trying to articulate cannot be understood [1, 4]. In total LIS, even the eyes are paralyzed [13]
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