Eyeblink recognition improves fatigue prediction from single-channel forehead EEG in a realistic sustained attention task.

OBJECTIVE: A passive brain-computer interface recognizes its operator's cognitive state without an explicitly performed control task. This technique is commonly used in conjunction with consumer-grade EEG devices for detecting the conditions of fatigue, attention, emotional arousal, or motion sickness. While it is easy to mount the sensors in the forehead area, which is not covered with hair, the recorded signals become greatly contaminated with eyeblink and movement artifacts, which makes it a challenge to acquire the data of suitable for analysis quality, particularly in few channel systems where a lack of spatial information limits the applicability of sophisticated signal cleaning algorithms. In this article, we demonstrate that by combining the features associated with electrocortical activities and eyeblink recognition analysis, it becomes feasible to design an accurate system for the inattention state prediction using just a single EEG sensor. APPROACH: Fifteen healthy 22-28 years old participants took part in the experiment that implemented a realistic sustained attention task of nighttime highway driving in a virtual environment. The EEG data were collected using a portable wireless Mindo-4 device, which constitutes an adjustable elastic strip with foam-based sensors, a data-acquisition module, an amplification and digitizing unit, and a Bluetooth[Formula: see text] module. MAIN RESULTS: The spectral analysis of the EEG samples that immediately preceded the lane departure events revealed alterations in the tonic power spectral density, which accompanied elongations in the drivers' reaction times. The RMSE of the predicted reaction times, which are based on a combination of the brain-related and eyeblink features, is 0.034 ± 0.019 s, and the r2 is 0.885 ± 0.057 according to a within-session leave-one-trial-out cross-validation. SIGNIFICANCE: The drowsiness prediction from a frontal single-channel setup can achieve a comparable performance with using an array of occipital EEG sensors. As a direct result of utilizing a dry sensor placed in the non-covered with hair head area, the proposed approach in this study is low-cost and user-friendly.

Associations Among Emotional State, Sleep Quality, and Resting-State EEG Spectra: A Longitudinal Study in Graduate Students.

University students are routinely influenced by a variety of natural stressors and experience irregular sleep-wake cycles caused by the necessity to trade sleep for studying while dealing with academic assignments. Often these factors result in long-term issues with daytime sleepiness, emotional instability, and mental exhaustion, which may lead to difficulties in the educational process. This study introduces the Daily Sampling System (DSS) implemented as a smartphone application, which combines a set of self-assessment scales for evaluating variations in the emotional state and sleep quality throughout a full academic term. In addition to submitting the daily sampling scores, the participants regularly filled in the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scales (DASS) reports and took part in resting-state EEG data recording immediately after report completion. In total, this study collected 1835 daily samples and 94 combined DASS with EEG datasets from 18 university students (aged 23-27 years), with 79.3± 15.3% response ratio in submitting the daily reports during an academic semester. The results of pairwise testing and multiple regression analysis demonstrate that the daily level of self-perceived fatigue correlates positively with stress, daytime sleepiness, and negatively with alertness on awakening, self-evaluated sleep quality, and sleep duration. The spectral analysis of the EEG data reveals a significant increase in the resting-state spectral power density across the theta and low-alpha frequency bands associated with increased levels of anxiety and stress. Additionally, the state of depression was accompanied by an intensification of high-frequency EEG activity over the temporal regions. No significant differences in prefrontal alpha power asymmetry were observed under the described experimental conditions while comparing the states of calmness and emotional arousal of the participants for the three conditions of depression, anxiety, and stress.

Enhancing the Hybrid BCI Performance With the Common Frequency Pattern in Dual-Channel EEG.

The brain-computer interface establishes a direct communication pathway between the human brain and an external device by recognizing specific patterns in cortical activities. The principle of hybridization stands for combining at least two different BCI modalities into a single interface with the aim of improving the information transfer rate by increasing the recognition accuracy and number of choices available for the user. This study proposes a simultaneous hybrid BCI system that recognizes the motor imagery (MI) and the steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEP) using the EEG signals from a dual-channel EEG setting with sensors placed over the central area (C3 and C4 channels). The data processing implements a supervised optimization algorithm for the feature extraction, named the common frequency pattern, which finds the optimal spectral filter that maximizes the separability of the data by classes. The experiment compares the classification accuracy in a two-class task using the MI, SSVEP and hybrid approaches on seventeen healthy 18-29 years old subjects with various dual-channel setups and complete set of thirty EEG electrodes. The designed system reaches a high accuracy of 97.4 ± 1.1% in the hybrid task using the C3-C4 channel configuration, which is marginally lower than the 98.8 ± 0.5% accuracy achieved with the complete set of channels while applying the support vector classifier; in the plain SSVEP task the accuracy drops from 91.3 ± 3.9% to 86.0 ± 2.5% while moving from the occipital to central area under the dual-channel condition. The results demonstrate that by combining the principles of hybridization and data-driven spectral filtering for the feature selection it is feasible to compensate a lack of spatial information and implement the proposed BCI using a portable few channel EEG device even under sub-optimal conditions for the sensors placement.

Development of Single-Channel Hybrid BCI System Using Motor Imagery and SSVEP.

Numerous EEG-based brain-computer interface (BCI) systems that are being developed focus on novel feature extraction algorithms, classification methods and combining existing approaches to create hybrid BCIs. Several recent studies demonstrated various advantages of hybrid BCI systems in terms of an improved accuracy or number of commands available for the user. But still, BCI systems are far from realization for daily use. Having high performance with less number of channels is one of the challenging issues that persists, especially with hybrid BCI systems, where multiple channels are necessary to record information from two or more EEG signal components. Therefore, this work proposes a single-channel (C3 or C4) hybrid BCI system that combines motor imagery (MI) and steady-state visually evoked potential (SSVEP) approaches. This study demonstrates that besides MI features, SSVEP features can also be captured from C3 or C4 channel. The results show that due to rich feature information (MI and SSVEP) at these channels, the proposed hybrid BCI system outperforms both MI- and SSVEP-based systems having an average classification accuracy of 85.6 ± 7.7% in a two-class task.

Sustained Attention in Real Classroom Settings: An EEG Study.

Sustained attention is a process that enables the maintenance of response persistence and continuous effort over extended periods of time. Performing attention-related tasks in real life involves the need to ignore a variety of distractions and inhibit attention shifts to irrelevant activities. This study investigates electroencephalography (EEG) spectral changes during a sustained attention task within a real classroom environment. Eighteen healthy students were instructed to recognize as fast as possible special visual targets that were displayed during regular university lectures. Sorting their EEG spectra with respect to response times, which indicated the level of visual alertness to randomly introduced visual stimuli, revealed significant changes in the brain oscillation patterns. The results of power-frequency analysis demonstrated a relationship between variations in the EEG spectral dynamics and impaired performance in the sustained attention task. Across subjects and sessions, prolongation of the response time was preceded by an increase in the delta and theta EEG powers over the occipital region, and decrease in the beta power over the occipital and temporal regions. Meanwhile, implementation of the complex attention task paradigm into a real-world classroom setting makes it possible to investigate specific mutual links between brain activities and factors that cause impaired behavioral performance, such as development and manifestation of classroom mental fatigue. The findings of the study set a basis for developing a system capable of estimating the level of visual attention during real classroom activities by monitoring changes in the EEG spectra.