Assistive technologies for traumatic brain injury

Abstract

This paper discusses an investigation carried out on choosing the appropriate brain-body interface for a group of non-verbal severely brain injured participants to aid communication and recreation. Although extensive research has been carried out in the last few years with invasive and non-invasive brain-body interfaces for the traumatic brain injured community, not enough has filtered through to be used as an everyday tool for communications.

Adaptive personalisation for researcher-independent brain body interface usage

“…Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) [8], but rehabilitation usage by members of the care circle without researcher support is more demanding than usage in laboratory or controlled clinical settings. BBIs enable individuals with traumatic brain injury to communicate, recreate or control their environment, but these novel technologies are unknown to the typical care circles for brain injured individuals [15][16][17][18]. Thus while we still see annual news reports on individuals controlling computers with their brains [17] (which our research group have achieved with individuals with traumatic brain injury in their care settings for almost a decade [12]), there is no guarantee that novel BBI usage in research settings will translate into usable technologies in the usage contexts where they are of most value as the only viable form of communication and environmental control.…”

“…Various protective tissues, the skull, blood flow and other brain matter between the scalp and area of the brain generating the signal can distort the bio-potentials drawn from the outside of the scalp. Hence invasive electrodes can give better signal to noise ratio and obtain signals from a single or small number of neurons [15,16]. This is an extreme response to the problem of noisy signals from BBIs.…”

“…Algorithms then translate these bio-potentials into instructions to direct a computer, giving people with brain injury a channel to communicate. Various research groups have developed non-invasive BBIs using approaches such as Electrooculography (EOG), Electroencephalalography (EEG), Electromyography (EMG), Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Slow Cortical Potentials (SCP), Electrocochleography (ECoG), Neuroprosthetic signals and low-frequency asynchronous switches [15,16].…”

“…The application requested will be launched on the screen and will be displayed for a pre-configured time, which enables a user to view sites such as news sites or sports sites. Thus as well as communicating, our BBI users can switch devices or launch computer applications [16,20].…”

“…There were three iterations of the design before arriving at the one illustrated in Figures 1-6 [16]. These formative evaluations provided the evidence for the suitability of the design reported in [18][19][20].…”