Controlling of smart home system based on brain-computer interface.

BACKGROUND: Brain computer interface (BCI) technology is a communication and control approach. Up to now many studies have attempted to develop an EEG-based BCI system to improve the quality of life of people with severe disabilities, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), paralysis, brain stroke and so on. The proposed BCIBSHS could help to provide a new way for supporting life of paralyzed people and elderly people.

OBJECTIVE: The goal of this paper is to explore how to set up a cost-effective and safe-to-use online BCIBSHS to recognize multi-commands and control smart devices based on SSVEP.

METHODS: The portable EEG acquisition device (Emotiv EPOC) was used to collect EEG signals. The raw signals were denoised by discrete wavelet transform (DWT) method, and then the canonical correlation analysis (CCA) method was used for feature extraction and classification. Another part is the control of smart home devices. The classification results of SSVEP can be translated into commands to control several devices for the smart home.

RESULTS: Here, the Power over Ethernet (PoE) technology was utilized to provide electrical energy and communication for those devices. During online experiments, four different control commands have been achieved to control four smart home devices (lamp, web camera, guardianship telephone and intelligent blinds). Experimental results showed that the online BCIBSHS obtained 86.88 ± 5.30% average classification accuracy rate.

CONCLUSION: The BCI and PoE technology, combined with smart home system, overcoming the shortcomings of traditional systems and achieving home applications management rely on EEG signal. In this paper, we proposed an online steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) based BCI system on controlling several smart home devices.