| Losing communication and control abilities imposes many restrictions on how, when and if different tasks can be done by the affected individuals. Unfortunately, accidents and many harmful diseases, including Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) impose such disabilities on individuals on a daily basis around the globe. Advances in technology and medicine have made it possible to know more and do more in terms of assistive technology during the past few decades. However, still most of the assistive devices are designed for specific tasks, such as typing or control.;In this dissertation, we introduce FlashLife(TM), a context aware language independent brain interface, suitable for everyday needs of an individual with disabilities. FlashLife(TM) provides control and communication abilities all through the same stimulation method using a single EEG electrode or eye tracking. In addition, use of the context information along with a probabilistic classification and decision making mechanism adds more robustness and flexibility at the same time. The stimulation paradigm provides highly accurate and fast classifications making use of short Calibration sessions. FlashLife(TM) provides performance estimates for each individual for different tasks taking advantage of the Calibration data. The stimulation paradigm has been put into use by different applications to do different tasks. A short list of applications is, FlashType(TM) for typing, FlashNav(TM) for navigation, FlashGrab(TM) for object manipulation and FlashPlay(TM) for entertainment in a virtual environment. |
