Inclusive Design for Brain Body Interfaces

Abstract

In comparison to all types of injury, those to the brain are among the most likely to result in death or permanent disability. A certain percentage of these brain-injured people cannot communicate, recreate, or control their environment due to severe motor impairment. This group of individuals with severe head injury has received little from assistive technology. Brain computer interfaces have opened up a spectrum of assistive technologies, which are particularly appropriate for people with traumatic brain-injury, especially those who suffer from "locked-in" syndrome. Previous research in this area developed brain body interfaces so that this group of brain-injured people can communicate, recreate and launch applications communicate using computers despite the severity of their brain injury, except for visually impaired and comatose participants. This paper reports on an exploratory investigation carried out with visually impaired using facial muscles or electromyography (EMG) to communicate using brain body interfaces.

Adaptive personalisation for researcher-independent brain body interface usage

“…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]. The evaluations and subsequent usage described here have only recently been partially reported in the first authors' PhD thesis [16].…”

“…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.…”

Developing Rehabilitation Robots for the Brain Injured

“…Not all users with special needs can use a mouse, trackball, and keyboard or have the ability to speak to a speech recognition system. So we need a device that provides communication capabilities for those who cannot use any of the regular input devices George, 2007 and such as:…”

Using Hand Motions in Conceptual Shape Design: Theories, Methods and Tools

“…Several modalities are studied individually or as part of a multimodal interface, such as speech (Wolf and Bugmann, 2006), hand gesture-or motion processing (Kettebekov and Sharma, 2001), head-and eye movement (Tanriverdi and Jacob, 2000), tactile information processing (Bordegoni and Cugini, 2007), haptic interaction (Seth et al, 2006), facial expressions (Truong, 2007) or recently brain signal processing (Gnanayutham and George, 2007).…”