Optimizing cognitive efficiency of emotiv EPOC and controlling wheelchair through it

Abstract

Brain Computer Interface (BCI) has opened a new era in the field of neuroscience. It has the potentiality to improve the quality of life of severely disabled patients. It allows them to regain the power of moving things by their affective, cognitive and expressive brain activities. Emotiv EPOC head set is a safe and comfortable BCI system which contains a number of advanced electrode sensors. It can detect and process the user’s thoughts, feelings and expressions in real time. A prototype of two wheeler robot is implemented and experimented which was controlled by the thought of human being. In average 72.65% accuracy is observed in the experiment for different aged people from 14 to 30 years old where the accuracy for the physically challenged people is 82% in average. Firstly the prototype software has to be trained by a specific user then it controls a wireless robot by the person’s thought for driving the robot in forward, backward, left and right directions. This robot can be stopped by a specific facial expression which does not need any training. The article also investigated the shortcomings and reviews on the reliability of the cognitive output efficiency of Emotiv EPOC EEG device, based on user comments and related researches. It has extended its possibilities to such an extent that now it has become possible to use BCI in the field of robotics and bio-medical systems. In the recent year the world has experienced some miraculous advancement of BCI due to advancement in the algorithm of EEG data extraction. Moreover, now a day the device architecture is also showing revolutionary development. These devices are efficient enough to be used in robotics but are very costly. It will be very inefficient to release a robotic product for the mass people considering the relatively high cost. Hence a EEG extraction device with law price and satisfactory performance is a need in the current context. This paper contains research works on building BCI based wheel-chair. The electrical wheelchair has been designed from the scratch and has been integrated with the BCI based device Emotiv EPOC. The paper describes how a wheelchair can be designed so that it works efficiently with the medium category EEG data extraction devices.