7,880 research outputs found
Review of real brain-controlled wheelchairs
This paper presents a review of the state of the art regarding wheelchairs driven by a brain-computer interface (BCI). Using a brain-controlled wheelchair (BCW), disabled users could handle a wheelchair through their brain activity, granting autonomy to move through an experimental environment. A classification is established, based on the characteristics of the BCW, such as the type of electroencephalographic (EEG) signal used, the navigation system employed by the wheelchair, the task for the participants, or the metrics used to evaluate the performance. Furthermore, these factors are compared according to the type of signal used, in order to clarify the differences among them. Finally, the trend of current research in this field is discussed, as well as the challenges that should be solved in the future
Learning Hybrid System Models for Supervisory Decoding of Discrete State, with applications to the Parietal Reach Region
Based on Gibbs sampling, a novel method to identify mathematical models of neural activity in response to temporal changes of behavioral or cognitive state is presented. This work is motivated by the developing field of neural prosthetics, where a supervisory controller is required to classify activity of a brain region into suitable discrete modes. Here, neural activity in each discrete mode is modeled with nonstationary point processes, and transitions between modes are modeled as hidden Markov models. The effectiveness of this framework is first demonstrated on a simulated example. The identification algorithm is then applied to extracellular neural activity recorded from multi-electrode arrays in the parietal reach region of a rhesus monkey, and the results demonstrate the ability to decode discrete changes even from small data sets
Goal-recognition-based adaptive brain-computer interface for navigating immersive robotic systems
© 2017 IOP Publishing Ltd. Objective. This work proposes principled strategies for self-adaptations in EEG-based Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) as a way out of the bandwidth bottleneck resulting from the considerable mismatch between the low-bandwidth interface and the bandwidth-hungry application, and a way to enable fluent and intuitive interaction in embodiment systems. The main focus is laid upon inferring the hidden target goals of users while navigating in a remote environment as a basis for possible adaptations. Approach. To reason about possible user goals, a general user-agnostic Bayesian update rule is devised to be recursively applied upon the arrival of evidences, i.e. user input and user gaze. Experiments were conducted with healthy subjects within robotic embodiment settings to evaluate the proposed method. These experiments varied along three factors: the type of the robot/environment (simulated and physical), the type of the interface (keyboard or BCI), and the way goal recognition (GR) is used to guide a simple shared control (SC) driving scheme. Main results. Our results show that the proposed GR algorithm is able to track and infer the hidden user goals with relatively high precision and recall. Further, the realized SC driving scheme benefits from the output of the GR system and is able to reduce the user effort needed to accomplish the assigned tasks. Despite the fact that the BCI requires higher effort compared to the keyboard conditions, most subjects were able to complete the assigned tasks, and the proposed GR system is additionally shown able to handle the uncertainty in user input during SSVEP-based interaction. The SC application of the belief vector indicates that the benefits of the GR module are more pronounced for BCIs, compared to the keyboard interface. Significance. Being based on intuitive heuristics that model the behavior of the general population during the execution of navigation tasks, the proposed GR method can be used without prior tuning for the individual users. The proposed methods can be easily integrated in devising more advanced SC schemes and/or strategies for automatic BCI self-adaptations
Multi-Person Brain Activity Recognition via Comprehensive EEG Signal Analysis
An electroencephalography (EEG) based brain activity recognition is a
fundamental field of study for a number of significant applications such as
intention prediction, appliance control, and neurological disease diagnosis in
smart home and smart healthcare domains. Existing techniques mostly focus on
binary brain activity recognition for a single person, which limits their
deployment in wider and complex practical scenarios. Therefore, multi-person
and multi-class brain activity recognition has obtained popularity recently.
Another challenge faced by brain activity recognition is the low recognition
accuracy due to the massive noises and the low signal-to-noise ratio in EEG
signals. Moreover, the feature engineering in EEG processing is time-consuming
and highly re- lies on the expert experience. In this paper, we attempt to
solve the above challenges by proposing an approach which has better EEG
interpretation ability via raw Electroencephalography (EEG) signal analysis for
multi-person and multi-class brain activity recognition. Specifically, we
analyze inter-class and inter-person EEG signal characteristics, based on which
to capture the discrepancy of inter-class EEG data. Then, we adopt an
Autoencoder layer to automatically refine the raw EEG signals by eliminating
various artifacts. We evaluate our approach on both a public and a local EEG
datasets and conduct extensive experiments to explore the effect of several
factors (such as normalization methods, training data size, and Autoencoder
hidden neuron size) on the recognition results. The experimental results show
that our approach achieves a high accuracy comparing to competitive
state-of-the-art methods, indicating its potential in promoting future research
on multi-person EEG recognition.Comment: 10 page
Sparse Bilinear Logistic Regression
In this paper, we introduce the concept of sparse bilinear logistic
regression for decision problems involving explanatory variables that are
two-dimensional matrices. Such problems are common in computer vision,
brain-computer interfaces, style/content factorization, and parallel factor
analysis. The underlying optimization problem is bi-convex; we study its
solution and develop an efficient algorithm based on block coordinate descent.
We provide a theoretical guarantee for global convergence and estimate the
asymptotical convergence rate using the Kurdyka-{\L}ojasiewicz inequality. A
range of experiments with simulated and real data demonstrate that sparse
bilinear logistic regression outperforms current techniques in several
important applications.Comment: 27 pages, 5 figure
Using Variable Dwell Time to Accelerate Gaze-Based Web Browsing with Two-Step Selection
In order to avoid the "Midas Touch" problem, gaze-based interfaces for
selection often introduce a dwell time: a fixed amount of time the user must
fixate upon an object before it is selected. Past interfaces have used a
uniform dwell time across all objects. Here, we propose a gaze-based browser
using a two-step selection policy with variable dwell time. In the first step,
a command, e.g. "back" or "select", is chosen from a menu using a dwell time
that is constant across the different commands. In the second step, if the
"select" command is chosen, the user selects a hyperlink using a dwell time
that varies between different hyperlinks. We assign shorter dwell times to more
likely hyperlinks and longer dwell times to less likely hyperlinks. In order to
infer the likelihood each hyperlink will be selected, we have developed a
probabilistic model of natural gaze behavior while surfing the web. We have
evaluated a number of heuristic and probabilistic methods for varying the dwell
times using both simulation and experiment. Our results demonstrate that
varying dwell time improves the user experience in comparison with fixed dwell
time, resulting in fewer errors and increased speed. While all of the methods
for varying dwell time resulted in improved performance, the probabilistic
models yielded much greater gains than the simple heuristics. The best
performing model reduces error rate by 50% compared to 100ms uniform dwell time
while maintaining a similar response time. It reduces response time by 60%
compared to 300ms uniform dwell time while maintaining a similar error rate.Comment: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor &
Francis in the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction on 30
March, 2018, available online:
http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10447318.2018.1452351 . For an eprint of
the final published article, please access:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/T9d4cNwwRUqXPPiZYm8Z/ful
Multimodal Control of a Robotic Wheelchair: Using Contextual Information for Usability Improvement
International audienceIn this paper, a method to perform semi-autonomous navigation on a wheelchair is presented. The wheelchair could be controlled in semi-autonomous mode estimating the user's intention by using a face pose recognition system or in manual mode. The estimator was performed within a Bayesian network approach. To switch these two modes, a speech interface was used. The user's intention was modeled as a set of typical destinations visited by the user. The algorithm was implemented to one experimental wheelchair robot. The new application of the wheelchair system with more natural and easy-to-use human machine interfaces was one of the main contributions. as user's habits and points of interest are employed to infer the user's desired destination in a map. Erroneous steering signals coming from the user- machine interface input are filtered out, improving the overall performance of the system. Human aware navigation, path planning and obstacle avoidance are performed by the robotic wheelchair while the user is just concerned with "looking where he wants to go"
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