MEDILLECT
Universal BCI Technology
A BRIEF INTRODUCTION
Rahim Rasool
Usman Shahid
Daniyal Khawaja
Hadi Murtaza
All of 4 of us are from the Electrical Engineering department currently enrolled in our 8th semester
OVERVIEW ● Brain Computer Interface (BCI) is an upcoming field that deals with using human thoughts to control applications ● This requires classification of human thoughts – that is, figuring out what an individual is thinking at any given moment. ● The first step in this is capturing the brainwaves by placing electrodes on the scalp at predefined locations – a process known as electroencephalography (EEG)
PROBLEM
● The field of BCI has grown leaps and bounds in the past few years, but most research focuses on developing hardware to acquire the and process brain signals ● There is a severe lack of software that integrates with the available EEG headsets and provides efficient processing and classification capabilities ● The problem corporations usually face is that they don’t have a software handy to integrate with their EEG devices and they end up having to build their own ● Organizations wanting to work on the end application of BCI have to iterate through the entire processing-classification-application pipeline instead of just working on the application they want
PROPOSED SOLUTION ● Our product is a software solution that integrates with the Emotiv Epoc+ Headset and provides pre-processing, feature extraction and classification capabilities ● The system is general purpose and will be able to adapt to any task requiring 3-class or 4-class classification ● Applications requiring 3 or 4 class classification (for example neuromarketing, prosthetic motor control, communication etc) can be built on top of the classifier, using its outputs - for example, using the 3 class outputs, a disabled user may be able to select between 3 words displayed on a screen.
MARKET RESEARCH A report by Aga Khan University stated that the total population of people with disabilities in Pakistan is around 5.035 million: ● 7.53% deaf/mute, ● 18.93% crippled, ● 8.23% with multiple disabilities Besides this, multinationals like Unilever, Pepsico and others are looking into Neuromarketing as the future of their advertising efforts In the research domain, the last 5 years have seen an exponential growth in publications pertaining to the applications of BCI systems With no real or practical solution being offered in the EEG/Brain Interface domain, we’re in a prime position to capture this empty space in the market
TECHNICAL OVERVIEW Feature sampledExtraction brainwave
1. The classifier gets from the Emotiv Epoc+ Headset
data
2. The data is then pre-processed and organized by passing it through 4 band pass filters 3. Features are extracted from the data via feature extraction techniques (Power Spectral Analysis - PSD and Common Spatial Patterns - CSP) 4. The features are classified using a binary classifier
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NOVELTY/VALUE PROPOSITION The software provides an easy to use service for brainwave classification with basically no technical expertise on the part of the user/client Our product helps NGOs, corporations and researchers who want to use BCI for their businesses/research by providing an easy to use solution for brainwave processing and classification
EASE OF ADOPTION ● Because this project is in a relatively new and unfamiliar domain, mass deployment would be possible if, and only when, customers are made familiar with the system and its intricacies ● Customers would require extensive training to work their way around the different patterns required to generate each specific output ● But, because humans can catch up with technology (ex: typing on a qwerty keyboard, texting on smartphones etc.), we’re confident that, in time, our system will be easy to use too
ESTIMATES OF FINANCIALS Because our product is a software solution, our main costs incurred have been: - The Emotiv Epoc+ Headset - Research costs (Travel expenses/Headset accessories) The total amount spent has been around Rs. 160k.
PROJECT TIMELINE
October
SUPPORT REQUIRED FROM DIFFERENT STAKEHOLDERS Our team has the technical expertise to run the backend of the system, but we require assistance in the following areas: •UI/UX design •Software/platform design • Marketing and business development •Financial advice •Industry mentorship •Industry contacts
FUTURE DIRECTION ●The project is innovative and solves a real need in the market. ●Classification overtime - we want to work on the efficiency and accuracy of the software and add more features as the market evolves ●Eventually we plan to move this to a SaaS (Software as a Service) model and provide subscription based services ●We also plan to add software support to headsets other than those manufactured by Emotiv in an attempt to create a universally adaptable system ●The domain this project operates in is one the team is very passionate about and we see ourselves trying our hardest to make this a viable startup
Thank you