Brain–Computer Interfaces - Index of

The First Commercial Brain–Computer Interface Environment 297
Fig. 13 Simulink model for P300 analysis and smart home control
each flashing event and sends the “ID” to the “Signal Processing” block. The “Signal
Processing” block creates a buffer for each character. After all the characters flashed,
the EEG data is used as input for the LDA and the system decides which letter
was most likely investigated by the subject. Then this character is displayed on the
computer screen. Nowadays, the P300 concept allows very reliable results with high
information transfer rates of up to 1 character per second [7, 21, 22].
4 BCI Applications
4.1 IntendiX
intendiX R○ is designed to be installed and operated by caregivers or the patient’s
family at home. The system consists of active EEG electrodes to avoid abrasion of
the skin, a portable biosignal amplifier and a laptop or netbook running the software
under Windows (see Fig. 14). The electrodes are integrated into the cap to allow a
fast and easy montage of the intendiX equipment.
The intendiX software allows viewing the raw EEG to inspect data quality, but
indicates automatically to the unexperienced user if the data quality on a specific
channel is good or bad. If the system is started up for the first time, a user training
has to be performed. Therefore usually 5–10 training characters are entered and the
user has to copy spell the characters. The EEG data is used to calculate the user
specific weight vector which is stored for later usage. Then the software switches
automatically into the spelling mode and the user can spell as many characters as
wanted.
The user can perform different actions: (i) copy the spelled text into an Editor,
(ii) copy the text into an email, (iii) send the text via text-to-speech facilities to the