Abstract

A brain computer interface (BCI) is a system which allows a person to communicate or control the surroundings without depending on the brain’s normal output pathways of peripheral nerves and muscles. A lot of successful applications have arisen utilizing the advantages of BCI to assist disabled people so called assistive technology. Considering using BCI has less limitation and huge potential, this project has been proposed to control the movement of an electronic wheelchair via brain signals. The goal of doing this project is to help the disabled people, especially paralyzed people suffering from motor disabilities, to improve their life qualities.

In order to realize the project stated above, Steady State Visual Evoked Potential ( is involved. It can be easily elicited in the visual cortical with the same frequency as the one is being focused by subject.

There are two important parts in this project. One is to process the EEG signals, and another one is to make a visual stimulator using hardware. The EEG signals are processed in Matlab using the algorithm of Butterworth Infinite Impulse Response IIR) bandpass filter for preprocessing and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) (for feature extraction). Besides, a harmonics-based classification method is proposed and applied in the classification part. Moreover, the design of the visual stimulator combines LEDs as flickers and LCDs as information displayers on one panel. Microcontrollers are employed to control the SSVEP visual stimuli panel.

This project is evaluated by subjects with different races and ages. Experimental results show the system is easy to be operated and it can achieve approximately minimum 1 second time delay. So, it demonstrates that this SSVEP based BCI controlled wheelchair has a huge potential to be applied for disabled people in the future.

Department(s)

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Second Department

Computer Science

Document Type

Thesis - Open Access

Document Version

Final Version

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2025 Ce Zhou, all rights reserved.

Publication Date

2016

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