Design, implementation and evaluation of a real-time P300-based brain-computer interface system

We present a new end-to-end brain-computer interface system based on electroencephalography (EEG). Our system exploits the P300 signal in the brain, a positive deflection in event-related potentials, caused by rare events. P300 can be used for various tasks, perhaps the most well-known being a spelling device. We have designed a flexible visual stimulus mechanism that can be adapted to user preferences and developed and implemented EEG signal processing, learning and classification algorithms. Our classifier is based on Bayes linear discriminant analysis, in which we have explored various choices and improvements. We have designed data collection experiments for offline and online decision-making and have proposed modifications in the stimulus and decision-making procedure to increase online efficiency. We have evaluated the performance of our system on 8 healthy subjects on a spelling task and have observed that our system achieves higher average speed than state-of-the-art systems reported in the literature for a given classification accuracy

Incorporation of a language model into a brain computer interface based speller

Brain computer interface (BCI) research deals with the problem of establishing direct communication pathways between the brain and external devices. The primary motivation is to enable patients with limited or no muscular control to use external devices by automatically interpreting their intent based on brain electrical activity, measured by, e.g., electroencephalography (EEG). The P300 speller is a widely practised BCI set up that involves having subjects type letters based on P300 signals generated by their brains in response to visual stimuli. Because of the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and variability of EEG signals, existing typing systems use many repetitions of the visual stimuli in order to increase accuracy at the cost of speed. The main motivation for the work in this thesis comes from the observation that the prior information provided by both neighbouring and current letters within words in a particular language can assist letter estimation with the aim of developing a system that achieves higher accuracy and speed simultaneously. Based on this observation, in this thesis, we present an approach for incorporation of such information into a BCI-based speller through Hidden Markov Models (HMM) trained by a language model. We then describe filtering and smoothing algorithms in conjunction with n-gram language models for inference over such a model. We have designed data collection experiments for offline and online decision-making which demonstrate that incorporation of the language model in this manner results in significant improvements in letter estimation and typing speed

Disjunctive normal unsupervised LDA for P300-based brain-computer interfaces

Can people use text-entry based brain-computer interface (BCI) systems and start a free spelling mode without any calibration session? Brain activities differ largely between people and across sessions for the same user. Thus, how can the text-entry system classify the target character among the other characters in the P300-based BCI speller matrix? In this thesis, we introduce a new unsupervised classifier for a P300-based BCI speller, which uses a disjunctive normal form representation to de ne an energy function involving a logistic sigmoid function for classification. Our proposed classifier updates the initialized random weights performing classification for the P300 signals from the recorded data exploiting the knowledge of the sequence of row/column highlights. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we performed an experimental analysis on data from 7 healthy subjects, collected in our laboratory and used public BCI competition datasets. We compare the proposed unsupervised method to a baseline supervised linear discriminant analysis (LDA) classifier and Bayesian linear discriminant analysis (BLDA) and demonstrate its performance. Our analysis shows that the proposed approach facilitates unsupervised learning from unlabelled test data

Adaptation in p300 and motor imagery-based BCI systems

Brain Computer Interface (BCI) is an alternative communication tool between human and computer. Motivation of BCI is to create a non-muscular communication environment for the use of external devices. Electroencephalography (EEG) signals are analyzed for understanding the user's intent in BCI systems. The nonstationary behavior of brain electrical activity (such as EEG), caused by changes in subject brain activities, environment conditions and calibration issues, is one of the main challenges of BCI systems. Another set of challenges involves limited amount of training data and subject-dependent characteristics of EEG. In this thesis, we suggest a semi-supervised adaptation approach for P300 based BCI speller systems to address these types of problems. The proposed approach is applied on a P300 speller which also incorporates a language model using Hidden Markov Models (HMM). The estimated labels from the classifier are used to retrain the classifier for adaptation. We have analyzed the effects of this adaptation approach on BCI systems with non-stationary EEG data and small size of training data. We propose to solve both problems by updating the BCI system with labels obtained from the classifier. We have shown that such an adaptation approach would improve BCI performance around 30% for systems with limited amount of training data, and 40% for transferring the system subject-to-subject. Moreover, we have investigated the potential use of error related potential (ErrP) signals in the P300-based BCI systems. The detection and classification of ErrP signals in BCI setting are presented along with the experimental analysis of ErrP