Real-Time Embedded EEG-Based Brain-Computer Interface

Online artifact rejection, feature extraction, and pattern recognition are essential to advance the Brain Computer Interface (BCI) technology so as to be practical for real-world applications. The goals of BCI system should be a small size, rugged, lightweight, and have low power consumption to meet the requirements of wearability, portability, and durability. This study proposes and implements a moving-windowed Independent Component Analysis (ICA) on a battery-powered, miniature, embedded BCI. This study also tests the embedded BCI on simulated and real EEG signals. Experimental results indicated that the efficacy of the online ICA decomposition is comparable with that of the offline version of the same algorithm, suggesting the feasibility of ICA for online analysis of EEG in a BCI. To demonstrate the feasibility of the wearable embedded BCI, this study also implements an online spectral analysis to the resultant component activations to continuously estimate subject's task performance in near real time.