Brain Computer Interfaces (BCls) are an emerging area of research combining the Neuroscience, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Human Computer Interaction and Psychology research fields. A BCI enables an individual to exert control of a computer without activation of the efferent nervous system or the muscles. This allows individuals suffering with partial or complete paralysis and associated conditions which prevent muscle movement to control a computer and hence communicate and exert control over their environment. This thesis first investigates tools for automatically removing artifacts from the Electroencephalogram (EEG), a signal commonly used in the control a BCI. Tools for measuring inter-regional connectivity patterns within the brain via phase synchronisation are then evaluated and extended to provide novel measures of inter-regional connectivity across the entire cortex. Feature selection approaches are then introduced and evaluated before being applied to select good feature sets for the discrimination of connectivity patterns. These approaches are compared to Markov modeling approaches which model and classify temporal dependencies in the data. The resulting tool-set is applied to a novel BCI control paradigm based upon the detection of single finger taps. It is demonstrated that the connectivity features produce significantly better classification accuracies than can be achieved using conventional features traditionally applied in BCI.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:553633 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Daly, Ian |
| Publisher | University of Reading |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
Page generated in 0.0122 seconds