Bci Technologies And Their Effectiveness

The field of computing has been an ever changing field with exponential changes being noticeable in the many decades that the computing field has been on the scene. This ever changing world has brought mankind a number of technologies and techniques that might have been deemed impossible a number of years ago thus making it a very interesting field. Until recently there has been a new field in the area of machine intelligence (AI), which was brought about by ideas that stemmed from the cinema. This was also further propelled by the recent rapid advances in technological development. The field of AI has stemmed a new field called Brain to computer interface (BCI), which aims to provide ways to understand human brain physiology and regional cerebral metabolism. Understanding of the latter will provide us with ways to finally provide a link between the brain and the computer in an ambition to control all that is around us.The field of BCI systems addresses a number of issues ranging from controlling of prosthetics, manipulating brain waves (in a case of people with epileptic brain seizures), enabling brain to brain communication, replacing a number of organs (in the event of organ failure for example eyes), military applications (detecting terror threats by reading peoples brain waves or easily detecting hostiles from non-hostiles), restoration of brain circuitry and many more. The number of issues that can be addressed by BCI systems span a number of fields and this thesis aims to give an understanding of how all of this is made possible, whether it is at all possible (or is it just a plan too ambitious for mankind) and its relevance in the world as we see it today (how the number of developed applications have helped address the issues stated above).Most of the BCI systems being researched on today if not all follow certain trends that a few researchers have made available to the public. BCI systems follow a certain design approach that always begins with capturing of brain signals, followed by processing of the captured brain signals (to remove artifacts and increase signal to noise ratio), then followed by feature selection and then followed by feature classification. After feature classification most BCI systems now move to developing logical independent control signals related to the neuromechanism used for the system. After the latter BCI systems move to developing device control signals and it is these that will be used to control how the device (which can be an electronic wheel chair, a prosthetic hand or eye and mind reading head band) reacts to the underlying neuromechanism.This thesis also aims to provide an offline functional BCI system to further analyze all of the gathered research at a more objective level looking at how the developed system will work in a given environment and also deduce how practical such systems are today (subject to time and resource availability). The thesis will provide a design process involved in designing a BCI system a development procedure and finally an implementation and test phase to see how it will pan out given any working environment. Software like BCI2000and OpenViBE will be used to design, develop and analyze the BCI system to be developed and analyze those that are already available to the public. These software’s provide a rich environment for designing developing and evaluating BCI systems.