Motor Imagery to Control Mobile Applications – An fNIRS Study

Germany has arrived at the point of demographic change: the number of older people will be outweighing the number of younger people within the near future. Therefore, it can be assumed that the demand for skilled nursing personnel will increase continuously. Especially during the care of patients with impaired cognitive or motor behaviors, neuroimaging is a critical technique. Moreover, neurorobotic interfaces can be used in other medical domains, e.g. gait rehabilitation. In the past, motor imagery was one of the most commonly applied tasks for Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) based on functional near-infrared spectroscopy. However, within our research project we analyzed different approaches on how to design BCIs for impaired patients. Therefore, we evaluated different techniques to ensure the highest possible success rate to increase the user experience. We analyzed an approach for binary decisions based on motor imagery. The outcome has found no significant differences between imagining movement and looking at an image showing a moving person