Advances in cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging technologies have provided us\u00a0with the ability to communicate directly with the brain. It has been made possible\u00a0through sensors that can monitor the neural activity within the brain. This technology\u00a0has been used to build Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) that enables direct\u00a0communication pathway between the brain and the object to be controlled or\u00a0communicated to. It provides users with an alternate method for acting on the world.<\/p>\n
There were three main objectives for this body of work: investigate, prototype and evaluate brain computer interfaces.
\n1) The main goal of the project was to familiarise with the BCI technology and understand its various design\u00a0methodologies and implementation. An extensive review of the current literature of BCI was carried out that included\u00a0the history, design and applications of the technology. Various existing applications and tools were compared and\u00a0studied.
\n2) The next step was to use this knowledge gained from the investigation and design a BCI system. The BCI system\u00a0was designed using facial expression. The facial expressions smile, clench, furrow, smirk and neutral were chosen to\u00a0drive the system. This system designed was then integrated to Nao humanoid robot to enable its control using facial\u00a0expressions. Another BCI application developed was a skype dialler that enables a user to choose a contact from the\u00a0dialler screen and call the selected contact using Skype.
\n3) A major focus of the project was the evaluation of BCI system. The accuracy and usability of the BCI system with\u00a0facial expressions was analysed. A study was undertaken to determine the reliability and consistency of the signals\u00a0caused due to facial expressions. This was achieved by conducting various experiments on users and by analysing the\u00a0brain signal data collected during the experiments.<\/p>\n