Using electroencephalogram (EEG) signal to control external devices has always been the research focus in the field of brain-computer interface (BCI). This is especially significant for those disabilities who have lost capacity of movements. In this paper, the P300-based BCI and the microcontroller-based wireless radio frequency (RF) technology are utilized to design a smart home control system, which can be used to control household appliances, lighting system, and security devices directly. Experiment results showed that the system was simple, reliable and easy to be populirised.
Electroencephalogram (EEG) is the primary tool in investigation of the brain science. It is necessary to carry out a deepgoing study into the characteristics and information hidden in EEGs to meet the needs of the clinical research. In this paper, we present a wavelet-nonlinear dynamic methodology for analysis of nonlinear characteristic of EEGs and delta, theta, alpha, and beta sub-bands. We therefore studied the effectiveness of correlation dimension (CD), largest Lyapunov exponen, and approximate entropy (ApEn) in differentiation between the interictal EEG and ictal EEG based on statistical significance of the differences. The results showed that the nonlinear dynamic characteristic of EEG and EEG subbands could be used as effective identification statistics in detecting seizures.
Sleep apnea syndrome (SAS) is a kind of harmful systemic sleep disorder with high incidence, and the pathological mechanism of it is complicated and the diagnosis and treatment are difficult. Mining the characteristic information of SAS from the single or small physiological signal is a hot topic in the research of sleep disorders in recent years. In our study shown in this paper, the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) was used to analyze sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) of SAS patients and normal healthy persons based on the non-stationary and nonlinear characteristics. It was found that in both groups, the scaling exponents increased gradually with the deepening of sleep, and in the rapid eye movement (REM) stage, the scaling exponents decreased. The scaling exponents of SAS group were significantly higher than those of the healthy group. The performance of SAS diagnosis based on scaling exponents was evaluated with receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve. The optimal threshold value 0.81 for the SAS and normal control were obtained, corresponding to the sensitivity 94.4%, specificity 99.2%, and area under curve (AUC) was 0.994. The results show that DFA scaling exponents have a good discrimination power and accuracy for the SAS, which provide a new theoretical basis for SAS diagnosis.
The clinical manifestations of patients with schizophrenia and patients with depression not only have a certain similarity, but also change with the patient's mood, and thus lead to misdiagnosis in clinical diagnosis. Electroencephalogram (EEG) analysis provides an important reference and objective basis for accurate differentiation and diagnosis between patients with schizophrenia and patients with depression. In order to solve the problem of misdiagnosis between patients with schizophrenia and patients with depression, and to improve the accuracy of the classification and diagnosis of these two diseases, in this study we extracted the resting-state EEG features from 100 patients with depression and 100 patients with schizophrenia, including information entropy, sample entropy and approximate entropy, statistical properties feature and relative power spectral density (rPSD) of each EEG rhythm (δ, θ, α, β). Then feature vectors were formed to classify these two types of patients using the support vector machine (SVM) and the naive Bayes (NB) classifier. Experimental results indicate that: ① The rPSD feature vector P performs the best in classification, achieving an average accuracy of 84.2% and a highest accuracy of 86.3%; ② The accuracy of SVM is obviously better than that of NB; ③ For the rPSD of each rhythm, the β rhythm performs the best with the highest accuracy of 76%; ④ Electrodes with large feature weight are mainly concentrated in the frontal lobe and parietal lobe. The results of this study indicate that the rPSD feature vector P in conjunction with SVM can effectively distinguish depression and schizophrenia, and can also play an auxiliary role in the relevant clinical diagnosis.
In the present paper, the contribution of the largest principal component and the number of principal component needed for accumulative contribution 95% are selected as indices of electroencephalogram (EEG) in mental fatigue state in order to investigate the relationship between these parameters and mental fatigue. The experimental results showed that the contribution of the largest principal component of EEG signals increased in the prefrontal, frontal and central areas, while the number of principal component needed for accumulative contribution decreased by 95% with the increasing mental fatigue level. The parameters of singular system of EEG signals can be regarded as useful features for the estimation of mental fatigue and have larger application value in the study of mental fatigue.
Sleep apnea syndrome (SAS) is a kind of common and harmful systemic sleep disorder. SAS patients have significant iconography changes in brain structure and function, and electroencephalogram (EEG) is the most intuitive parameter to describe the sleep process which can reflect the electrical activity and function of brain tissues. Based on the non-stationary and nonlinear characteristics of EEG, this paper analyzes the correlation dimension of sleep EEG in patients with SAS. Six SAS patients were classed as SAS group and six healthy persons were classified into a control group. The results showed that the correlation dimension of sleep EEG in the SAS group and the control group decreased gradually with the deepening of sleep, and then increased to the level of awake and light sleep stage with rapid eye movement (REM). The correlation dimension of SAS group was significantly lower than that of control group (P<0.01) throughout all the stages. The results suggested that there were significant nonlinear dynamic differences between the EEG signals of SAS patients and of healthy people, which provided a new direction for the study of the physiological mechanism and automatic detection of SAS.
Vigilance is defined as the ability to maintain attention for prolonged periods of time. In order to explore the variation of brain vigilance in work process, we designed addition and subtraction experiment with numbers of three digits to induce the vigilance to change, combined it with psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) to measure this process of electroencephalogram (EEG), extracted and analyzed permutation entropy (PE) of 11 cases of subjects' EEG and made a brief comparison with nonlinear parameter sample entropy (SE). The experimental results showed that:PE could well reflect the dynamic changes of EEG when vigilance decreases, and has advantages of fast arithmetic speed, high noise immunity, and low requirements for EEG length. This can be used as a measure of the brain vigilance indicators.
With the wide application of virtual reality technology and the rapid popularization of virtual reality devices, the problem of brain fatigue caused by prolonged use has attracted wide attention. Sixteen healthy subjects were selected in this study. And electroencephalogram (EEG) signals were acquired synchronously while the subjects watch videos in similar types presented by traditional displayer and virtual reality separately. Two questionnaires were conducted by all subjects to evaluate the state of fatigue before and after the experiment. The mutual correlation method was selected to construct the mutual correlation brain network of EEG signals before and after watching videos in two modes. We also calculated the mutual correlation coefficient matrix and the mutual correlation binary matrix and compared the average of degree, clustering coefficient, path length, global efficiency and small world attribute during two experiments. The results showed that the subjects were easier to get fatigue by watching virtual reality video than watching video presented by traditional displayer in a certain period of time. By comparing the characteristic parameters of brain network before and after watching videos, it was found that the average degree value, the average clustering coefficient, the average global efficiency and the small world attribute decreases while the average path length value increased significantly. In addition, compared to traditional plane video, the characteristic parameters of brain network changed more greatly after watching the virtual reality video with a significant difference (P < 0.05). This study can provide theoretical basis and experimental reference for analyzing and evaluating brain fatigue induced by virtual reality visual experience.
The brain-computer interface (BCI) systems used in practical applications require as few electroencephalogram (EEG) acquisition channels as possible. However, when it is reduced to one channel, it is difficult to remove the electrooculogram (EOG) artifacts. Therefore, this paper proposed an EOG artifact removal algorithm based on wavelet transform and ensemble empirical mode decomposition. Firstly, the single channel EEG signal is subjected to wavelet transform, and the wavelet components which involve EOG artifact are decomposed by ensemble empirical mode decomposition. Then the predefined autocorrelation coefficient threshold is used to automatically select and remove the intrinsic modal functions which mainly composed of EOG components. And finally the ‘clean’ EEG signal is reconstructed. The comparative experiments on the simulation data and the real data show that the algorithm proposed in this paper solves the problem of automatic removal of EOG artifacts in single-channel EEG signals. It can effectively remove the EOG artifacts when causes less EEG distortion and has less algorithm complexity at the same time. It helps to promote the BCI technology out of the laboratory and toward commercial application.
It is the functional connectivity between motor cortex and muscle that directly relates to the rehabilitation of the dysfunction in upper limbs and neuromuscular activity status, which can be detected by electroencephalogram-electromyography (EEG-EMG) coherence analysis. In this study, based on coherence analysis method, we process the acquisition signals which consist of 9 channel EEG signal from motor cortex and 4 channel EMG signal from forearm, by using 4 groups of hand motions in the healthy subjects, including flexor digitorum, extensor digitorum, wrist flexion, and wrist extension. The results showed that in the β-band, the coherence coefficients between C3 and flexor digitorum (FD) was greater than extensor digitorum (ED) in the right hand flexor digitorum movement; the coherence coefficients between C3 and ED was greater than FD in the right hand extensor digitorum movement; the coherence coefficients between C3 and flexor carpi ulnaris (FCU) was greater than extensor carpi radialis (ECR) in the right hand wrist flexion movement; the coherence coefficients between C3 and ECR was greater than FCU in the right hand wrist extension movement. This analysis provides experimental basis to explore the information decoding of hand motion based on corticomuscular coherence (CMC).