Age-Related Changes in Vibro-Tactile EEG Response and Its Implications in BCI Applications: A Comparison Between Older and Younger Populations

Abstract

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The rapid increase in the number of older adults around the world is accelerating research in applications to support age-related conditions, such as brain-computer interface (BCI) applications for post-stroke neurorehabilitation. The signal processing algorithms for electroencephalogram (EEG) and other physiological signals that are currently used in BCI have been developed on data from much younger populations. It is unclear how age-related changes may affect the EEG signal and therefore the use of BCI by older adults. This research investigated the EEG response to vibro-tactile stimulation from 11 younger (21.7 ± 2.76 years old) and 11 older (72.0 ± 8.07 years old) subjects. The results showed that: 1) the spatial patterns of cortical activation in older subjects were significantly different from those of younger subjects, with markedly reduced lateralization; 2) there is a general power reduction of the EEG measured from older subjects. The average left vs. right BCI performance accuracy of older subjects was 66.4 ± 5.70%, 15.9% lower than that of the younger subjects (82.3 ± 12.4%) and statistically significantly different (t(10) = -3.57, p = 0.005). Future research should further investigate age-differences that may exist in electrophysiology and take these into consideration when developing applications that target the older population.This work was supported in part by the University of Waterloo’s Starter Grant 203859, in part by Schlegel Research Chair funds, and in part by the Early Researcher Award from the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science of Ontario under Grant ER17-13-183