Research,Design And Implementation Of An Integrated System For Nursing Bed And Home Appliances Control Based On A Hybrid Brain-computer Interface

Brain-computer interfaces(BCIs) are direct communication and control channels between human brains and computers or other electronic devices without the participation of peripheral nerves and muscles. Using a BCI, the patients with severe motor disabilities, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and spinal cord injuries, can control external electronic devices. Several studies have shown that hybrid BCIs may have better performances in terms of detection accuracy and speed than simple BCIs that use single brain signal. Generally, a hybrid BCI is composed of two or more BCIs.This paper proposes a hybrid BCI-based integrated system for nursing bed and home appliances control. Specifically, an asynchronous brain switch combining steady-state visual evoked potential(SSVEP) and P300 is used to switch on/off the integrated control system, whereas a P300-based BCI is used for selectively operating the nursing bed and home appliances. Here, the combination of SSVEP and P300 is designed for improving the performance of the brain switch; home appliances include three lamps, an air conditioner, and a television(TV).First, this paper introduces the content-related backgrounds and significances, and reviews the BCI technology. The techniques involving both SSVEP-based and P300-based BCIs provide a theoretical basis for the implementation of the proposed system. Next, the hardware circuit and software designs of the proposed system are introduced in details. For the hardware circuit design, a main controller, a lamp controller, an air conditioner controller, and a TV controller are separately implemented, all of which are based on the microcontroller STM32F103VCT6. The software design involves graphical user interfaces(GUIs), detection SSVEP and P300 algorithms, and programs for sending control commands and control executions. The communications between the host computer and the main controller are implemented via a serial manner. Finally, eight healthy subjects participated in two experiments(Experiments 1 and 2). Our experimental results demonstrated the stability and reliability of the proposed system.In the future work, we will further improve the control functions of the air conditioner and TV, and integrate more home appliances control, e.g., electric curtains and a music player. Furthermore, for the purpose of clinical applications, we will apply the proposed system in bedridden patients to verify and improve our system.