Brainy Home: A Virtual Smart Home and Wheelchair Control Application Powered by Brain Computer Interface

In recent years, smart home applications have become imperative to improve the life quality of people, especially for those with motor disabilities. While the smart home applications are controlled with interaction tools such as mobile phones, voice commands, and hand gestures, these may not be appropriate for people with severe disabilities that impacts their motor functions, for instance locked-in-syndrome (LIS), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), cerebral palsy, stroke. etc. In this research, we have developed a smart home and wheelchair control application in a virtual environment, which is controlled solely by the steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) based brain computer interface (BCI) system. It is a relatively low cost, easy to setup wireless communication protocol, which offers high accuracy. The system has been tested on 15 healthy subjects and the preliminary results comprehensively show that all the subjects completed the device interaction tasks with approximately 100% accuracy. and wheelchair navigation tasks with over 90% accuracy. These results clearly indicate that in future, the developed system could be used for real-time interfacing with assistive devices and smart home appliances. The proposed system. thus may play a vital role in empowering the disabled people to perform daily-life activities independently.