- Details
- Created on Wednesday, 11 November 2015 10:02
Shin’ichiro Kanoh, Ph.D (Engineering)
Department of Electronic Engineering,
College of Engineering,
Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan
Topic: Bridging brain and daily life: brain-computer interface and beyond.
Abstract
The mental states or intentions in humans can be decoded from the biosignals. The recent improvements of the computational power and downsizing of the personal computers enable to bridge brain and daily life in a noninvasive way.
A brain-computer interface (BCI) is a non-muscular communication channel which allows physically disabled people to re-establish interaction with their surrounding environment. This system could extract and detect user’s intentions or “thoughts” from brain activities which are measured by EEG (electroencephalogram) or NIRS (near-infrared spectroscopy) or other non-invasive techniques. We developed the BCI system to detect user’s motor imagery from brain activations on sensory-motor cortex, and it was shown that online neuro-feedback training (training with a feedback of brain activities) contributed the improvement of command detection accuracy. We also proposed BCIs to detect user’s selective attention to the sensory (auditory, visual) stimuli from elicited ERP (event-related potential). Moreover our study suggested the possibility of an EEG-based BCI system which was directly controlled by user's mental expectation, without requesting users to execute explicit tasks.
It is also possible to detect user’s mental states from eye movements. To enable detection of mental and physical states of users in a daily life, we have been developing an eyewear (“JINS MEME”) to measure eye and body movement in an unrestricted way. The horizontal and vertical EOG (electrooculogram) signals are measured and amplified with three metal dry electrodes placed near nasion and both sides of rhinion, of which positions correspond to the bridge and nose pads of eyewear, respectively. The user’s mental states like drowsiness, sleepiness, mental fatigue, or interest to objects can be identified by the movements and blinking of the eyes extracted from the measured EOG. And the six-axis motion sensor (three-axis accelerometer and three-axis gyroscope) mounted in the eyewear measures the body motions. This device enables you to look into “yourself” as well as outer scenes. In this presentation, our recent studies on interfacing between brain and daily life are introduced and discussed.