Gnanayutham, Paul

English

Name not available

Brain Computer Interface for Rehabilitation Robots 
Paul Gnanayutham 
School of Computing, University of Portsmouth, Buckingham Building, 
Lion Terrace, Portsmouth, PO1 3HE, United Kingdom, 
paul.gnanayutham@port.ac.uk 
Abstract. Although rehabilitation robotics have been used for helping disabled 
persons in various areas of disability, such as stroke rehabilitation, This paper 
discusses the implementation of a simple model, which consists of brain body 
interface, a computer, an interface program and an electronic circuit to interface the 
computer to a robotic arm. In this paper, we take the brain body interface 
communications a step further where the brain injured persons will not only 
communicate but will also be able to do simple tasks. 
Keywords: Rehabilitation, Robot, Brain Injury, Cyberlink™, Brain Computer 
Interface 
 
1 INTRODUCTION 
The word ‘Robot’ come originally from a play in 1923 with the meaning a ‘slave worker’ (from 
the 1923 play Rossum’s Universal Robots). The early uses of robots were mechanical devices 
using gears and levers. The advent of computers and the fast and furious new technology has 
given the robots the capability to perform sophisticated tasks others than mundane routine jobs. 
Robots are in action in the Military, Health sector, Manufacturing, Space exploration, Mining etc. 
If asked to describe a robot many people would describe something from a science fiction, our 
mental images are guided more by science fiction than science reality. The reality is probably a 
car assembly robot rather than the evil Dalek of Dr Who. Originally most robots were used as 
tools in a manufacturing environment, whether spraying, welding or assembling. These are 
normally referred to as assembly robots. It has long been realised that, while robotics will 
continue to have a vital role in the manufacturing industry, the areas for growth lie in applications 
in "unstructured and hostile environments". Many applications in an unstructured environment 
are "service" applications. Service robots have for a while been used for tasks at home such as 
cleaning, cutting the lawn, etc. Also hazardous environments such as searching underwater, 
within a nuclear reactor, the making safe of bombs and mines.  
   Over the past 20 years there has been much research in the area of ‘advanced robotics’. The 
precision of a medical robot is claimed to be even better than a skilled surgeon 
(www.prosurgics.com). In addition to surgery, robotic technology can be used in several ways to 
benefit people with disabilities. Although there are many potential benefits for the disabled user, 
there are also very strong requirements and compromises, which must be considered in 
integrating the robotic arm with the wheelchair. Robots are being used in places such as Japan for 
caring for the physically handicapped people. These robots do the daily routine chaos thus taking 
the burden away from the careers and also saving a lot of money. The operators control these 
mobile robots through the Internet and mobile phones (Yoshiyuki et al., 2000).  The new trend in 
robotics is to control robots remote using the Internet or mobile phone.  
1.1.   Rehabilitation robotics from past to present 
Tzika and team claim (2008) that the brain has the ability to regain function through rehabilitative 
exercises following a stroke also that the brain is malleable, even six months or more after a 
stroke, which is a longer period of time than previously thought. This gives hope to people who 
have had strokes, their families and the rehabilitative specialists who treat those (Tzika et al., 
2008). 
   The first referenced rehabilitation manipulator was the CASE manipulator built in the early 
1960, which could move the user's paralysed arm (Kim and Cook, 1985). Mid 1970 saw the next 
stage of rehabilitation robotics in the form of a workstation based system designed by Roesler 
with five degree of freedom manipulator was placed in a specially adapted desktop environment, 
using rotating shelf units (Roesler et al., 1978). Another early workstation system was that of 
Seamone and Schmeisser. The arm of this system was based around an electrically powered 
prosthetic arm, mounted on a horizontal track. Various items of equipment (e.g. telephone, book 
rest, computer discs) were laid out on the simple but cleverly designed workstation table and 
could be manipulated by the arm using pre-programmed commands (Seamone and Schmeisser, 
1986). Mason and Peizer (1978), developed the first ever robot arm mounted to a wheelchair, 
potentially offering much greater freedom than a workstation mounted system. The four degree of 
freedom arm and its novel telescoping design allowed it to reach to the floor or the ceiling 
(Hillman, 2003). Some more examples (Hillman et al., 2002a):  
 Desk based system - "Wolfson" robot - for the desk based activities; 
 Trolley mounted system - "Wessex" robot - requires a carer to move a trolley-based 
manipulator around from one room to another; 
 Wheelchair mounted system - "Weston" robot - shares many common components with the 
trolley-mounted system, but mounted to a wheelchair. 
   All the rehabilitation robots mentioned above needed some type of motoring ability to 
manipulate such as a switch or joy stick and utilise the robot for carrying out various tasks. 
However the brain injured quadriplegic community was not catered by the developers of the 
rehabilitation robots above. This paper looks at the possibility of catering for this group of brain 
injured quadriplegic individuals to use rehabilitation robots for similar usage. The results of an 
exploratory study carried out using a robotic arm and bio-potentials from the forehead of a brain 
injured user is used an example of what could be done to cater for this group of brain injured 
quadriplegic individuals.  
2 DESIGNING FOR THE BRAIN INJURED 
   There are several areas where a robotic device might assist a disabled person, here are some 
examples (Hillman et al., 2002b): 
 Eating and drinking (Fig.1); 
 Personal hygiene, such as washing, shaving;  
 Work and leisure, such as handling papers, books or videos (Fig.2); 
 Access, such as opening doors, operating light switches or lift buttons; 
 Reaching and moving, such as reaching down to pick up an item off the floor or reaching up to 
get an item off of a shelf. 
 
 Fig. 1. Robot for eating and drinking 
 
 
Fig. 2. Work and leisure, such as handling papers, books or videos 
 
   As for the mechanical construction of attaching a robotic extension to a wheelchair there are 
different requirements in comparison to either a desktop or mobile system. Mounting a robotic 
extension into a desktop provides a "workstation" based approach, and all the items to be 
manipulated are placed within a known area of reach. The mobile approach is similar since the 
trolley-mounted robotic extension is intended to interact with objects at a number of different 
workstations (Hillman et al., 2002b). Another choice of construction will be an agent architecture 
in which the agent must operate without hindering the user’s ability to take direct action when 
he/she will choose (Hillman et al., 2002b). 
3 ROBOTS FOR QUADRIPLEGIC BRAIN INJURED  
   Not all users with special needs can use a mouse, trackball, and keyboard or have the ability to 
speak to a speech recognition system. So we need a device that provides communication 
capabilities for those who cannot use any of the regular input devices (Gnanayutham and George, 
2007 and 2009) such as: 
 HeadMouse™ - using wireless optical sensor that transforms head movement into cursor 
movement on the screen; 
 Tonguepoint™  - a system mounted on mouth piece; 
 Eye Tracker™ -  a system that allows the monitoring of both the conscious and unconscious 
gaze 
   All the devices above have their advantages and disadvantages. A user with cerebral palsy will 
not have good motor abilities to operate the ‘Tonguepoint™’. A user with spinal vertebrate fusion 
may not be able to turn his or head and the HeadMouse™ will be of no use to this user.  
 
 
Fig. 3. Cyberlink the Brain Computer Interface used in this research 
 
   At present one of the brain computer interface devices that can cater for the quadriplegic brain 
injured individual is the Cyberlink™ (Fig. 3) because it uses a combination of bio-potentials. 
‘Cyberlink™’ can be used as a technology that combines eye movement, eye blink, facial muscle 
and brain wave bio-potentials detected at the user’s forehead to generate a mouse input that can 
be used for communicating. Cyberlink™ uses the forehead as non-invasive site, for convenience 
and also because it has a rich variety of bio-potentials. The signals for communications are 
obtained by attaching probes on the forehead of the patients. It is 3 silver/silver chloride contact 
electrodes (i.e. non-invasive), which are placed on a headband that picks up EEG (brain wave), 
EMG (muscle movement wave) and EOG (Eye ball movement) signals when applied on the 
forehead.  These are then fed into an amplifier box and then to the mouse port, so the computer 
just sees the device as a mouse, which, is used to control the cursor.  The main signals used are 
due to muscle movement, only about 10% is due to thought processes (Brain wave). We used the 
Cyberlink™ to communicate with the brain injured persons to get basic yes/no answers 
(Gnanayutham and George, 2009a). This time we want to go a step further and make the brain 
injured user perform simple tasks using a robotic arm (Doherty et al., 2003, Gnanayutham et al., 
2001). 
 
   The model for operating the robotic arm using the brain body interface consisted of following 
components: 
1. A Cyberlink™ brain body actuated control technology system that connects to the computer 
via the serial port; 
2. A computer with a parallel port and serial port free. An Interface program written in Visual 
Basic™ to operate the functions of the robotic arm; 
3. An Electronic circuit to read the parallel port of the computer and operate the motors that 
manipulate the robotic arm; 
4. A robotic arm (Super Armatron™) that is operated using a series of motors. 
 
 
Fig. 4. Model for operating the robotic arm 
 
   The Fig. 4, shows the model for operating the robotic arm using the brain body interface. The 
computer needed one serial port for the Cyberlink™ and a parallel port for the electronic circuit 
that interfaced the computer with the robotic arm. The Cyberlink probes were attached to the 
forehead of the user and the other end of the Cyberlink was connected to the serial port of the 
computer (Gnanayutham et al., 2001).  
 
 
Fig. 5. Interface Program 
   The computer had a program written in Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0™, which had six paths for 
controlling the robotic arm (Fig. 5). The paths ended up in one of these functions, arm go up, arm 
down, arm left, arm right, open claw and close claw. When one of these six functions were 
triggered, the program sent a binary code to the parallel port, which drove one of the motors to 
carry out what was requested by the user. The Electronic circuit used in the above setup is shown 
below. 
 
 
Fig. 6. Electronic Circuit 
 
   In Fig. 6, we see the block diagram of the electronic circuit that was used. The output from the 
parallel port was decoded and used for switching transistors. The transistors switched the motors 
on and off in either direction. The mechanical side of the circuit included aligning shafts and 
making sure there were no vibrations. 
   The robotic arm described in this section was developed and used as a live demonstration at the 
ICCIT'2001 conference in New Jersey where a quadriplegic individual picked up a cup to his 
mouth to show, how we can use a brain body interface and operate a robotic arm. Since then the 
researchers have concentrated on mainly communication, recreation and controlling the 
environment using brain body interfaces (Gnanayutham et al., 2009b). Now the researchers feel 
it’s time to help this group of the disabled who perhaps need robotics than other motor impaired 
individuals. There is one previous successful research carried out by Felzer, and Freisleben 
(2002) but no commercial product has come out of that piece of research. At present work is 
carried out at University of Essex also on navigating a wheel chair using bio-potentials (Chen et 
al., 20007, Lai et al., 2009).  
4 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS  
This paper indicated the various choices of rehabilitation robots that are available in the market, 
used mainly for stroke rehabilitation and other disability where the user is able manipulate a 
mouse, switch or a joystick. This paper also tackled the area of giving this sophisticated and 
powerful robot as a tool for the brain injured who perhaps need it more than any other category of 
people. Robots have been in science fiction for many years and but now we can extend these 
robots to the brain injured quadriplegics personnel by using their bio-potentials as the input 
instead of a mechanical switch, mouse or a joy stick. This exciting new research is going to 
change many a brain-injured person’s life and set them on the path of rehabilitation.  
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Brain computer interface for rehabilitation robots

Portsmouth University Research Portal (Pure)

Adaptive Personalisation for ResearcherIndependent Brain-Body Interface Usage,

Communicating, Recreating and Controlling the Environment Using an Adaptive Brain-Body Interface,

Development of the Mobile Robot System to aid the daily life for Physically Handicapped,

EMG-based Hands-Free Wheelchair Control with EOG Attention Shift Detection,

Evaluation of the JHU/APL Robot Arm Workstation, Interactive Robotic Aids. World Rehabilitation Fund Monograph#37,

HaWCoS: the &quot;hands-free&quot; wheelchair control system,

Improving the flexibility of an assistive Robot,

Inclusive Design for Brain Body Interfaces, Edited by

Manipulation and Mobility Aids, Electronic Devices for Rehabilitation, Chapman and

Medical Manipulator for Quadriplegic,

Rehabilitation robotics from past to present - a historical perspective, ICORR,

Robotics for the brain injured: An interface for the brain injured person to operate a robotic arm –

Stroke Rehabilitation Improved By Robotic Technology, Medical News Today,

The Medical Manipulator and its Adapted Environment: A System for the Rehabilitation of Severely Handicapped,

The OWI007 Robotic Arm, Cyberlink Interface, and Visual C++ Interface are a Great Help to the Handicapped and a Good Platform for Teaching Technology, Njedge.net Conference,

The Weston Wheelchair Mounted Assistive Robot

Use of Forehead Bio-signals for Controlling an Intelligent Wheelchair,

https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/portal/services/downloadRegister/132655/BCI_Robots.pdf

Brain computer interface for rehabilitation robots

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