Guess the Number - Applying a Simple Brain-Computer Interface to School-age Children

Lukáš Vařeka, Tomáš Prokop, Jan Štěbeták, Roman Mouček

2016

Abstract

Although research into brain-computer interfaces is more common in recent years, studies concerning large groups of specific subjects are still lacking. This paper describes a simple brain-computer interface (BCI) experiment that was performed on a group of over 200 school-age children using the technique and methods of event related potentials. In the first phase, experimental data were recorded in various elementary and secondary schools, mainly in the Pilsen region of the Czech Republic. The task was to guess the number between 1 and 9 that the measured subject thinks on. Concurrently, a human expert made a decision about the target number based on averaged P300 waveforms observed on-line. In the second phase, an application for automatic classification was developed for off-line data. A small subset of the data was used for training; the rest of the data was used to evaluate the accuracy of classification. Two feature extraction methods were compared; subsampling and discrete wavelet transform for feature extraction. Multi-layer perceptron was used for classification. The human expert achieved the accuracy of 67.6%, while some of the automatic algorithms were able to significantly outperform the expert; the maximum classification accuracy reached 77.2%.

References

  1. Blankertz, B., Muller, K., Curio, G., Vaughan, T., Schalk, G., Wolpaw, J., Schlogl, A., Neuper, C., Pfurtscheller, G., Hinterberger, T., Schroder, M., and Birbaumer, N. (2004). The bci competition 2003: progress and perspectives in detection and discrimination of eeg single trials. Biomedical Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, 51(6):1044-1051.
  2. BrainProducts (2012). Brain vision recorder. www.brainproducts.com/productdetails.php?id=21.
  3. Cashero, Z. (2012). Comparison of Eeg Preprocessing Methods to Improve the Performance of the P300 Speller. Proquest, Umi Dissertation Publishing.
  4. Letelier, J. C. and Weber, P. P. (2000). Spike sorting based on discrete wavelet transform coefficients. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 101(2):93 - 106.
  5. Luck, S. (2005). An introduction to the event-related potential technique. Cognitive neuroscience. MIT Press.
  6. Markazi, S., Qazi, S., Stergioulas, L., Ramchurn, A., and Bunce, D. (2006). Wavelet filtering of the p300 com3.45 3.46 3.36 3.43 3.26 3.26 3.33 3.23 3.24 3.23 3.21 3.29 3.12 3.05 3.03 2.99 3.06 2.99 2.92 ponent in event-related potentials. In Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2006. EMBS 7806. 28th Annual International Conference of the IEEE, pages 1719-1722.
  7. McFarland, D. J. and Wolpaw, J. R. (2011). Brain-computer interfaces for communication and control. Commun. ACM, 54(5):60-66.
  8. Moucek, R. and Jezek, P. (2009). Eeg/erp portal. http://eegdatabase.kiv.zcu.cz/home.html.
  9. Quiroga, R. and Garcia, H. (2003). Single-trial eventrelated potentials with wavelet denoising. Clinical Neurophysiology, 114(2):376-390.
  10. Rafiee, J., Rafiee, M., Prause, N., and Schoen, M. (2011). Wavelet basis functions in biomedical signal processing. Expert Systems with Applications, 38(5):6190 - 6201.
  11. Vareka, L., Bruha, P., and Moucek, R. (2014). Event-related potential datasets based on a three-stimulus paradigm. GigaScience, 3(1):1-5.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Vařeka L., Prokop T., Štěbeták J. and Mouček R. (2016). Guess the Number - Applying a Simple Brain-Computer Interface to School-age Children . In Proceedings of the 9th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 4: BIOSIGNALS, (BIOSTEC 2016) ISBN 978-989-758-170-0, pages 263-270. DOI: 10.5220/0005801402630270


in Bibtex Style

@conference{biosignals16,
author={Lukáš Vařeka and Tomáš Prokop and Jan Štěbeták and Roman Mouček},
title={Guess the Number - Applying a Simple Brain-Computer Interface to School-age Children},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 9th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 4: BIOSIGNALS, (BIOSTEC 2016)},
year={2016},
pages={263-270},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005801402630270},
isbn={978-989-758-170-0},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 9th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 4: BIOSIGNALS, (BIOSTEC 2016)
TI - Guess the Number - Applying a Simple Brain-Computer Interface to School-age Children
SN - 978-989-758-170-0
AU - Vařeka L.
AU - Prokop T.
AU - Štěbeták J.
AU - Mouček R.
PY - 2016
SP - 263
EP - 270
DO - 10.5220/0005801402630270