Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a Brain-Computer Interface Controlled Mechanical Arm for Rehabilitation

Artificial limbs and exoskeletons have been widely used in a variety of applications, from military to medicine. DARPA primarily focuses on developing exoskeletons to aid ground soldiers in both physical performance skills and survivability. Robotic arms have been used to assist individuals who have lost the ability to perform everyday activities such as walking because of grievous medical injuries. In this paper we present design, implementation and evaluation of a mechanical arm controlled by commercially-off-the-shelf brain-computer interface (BCI) technology. The work examines the viability of incorporating the BCI technology to the control system of an exoskeleton or an artificial limb that serves as a rehabilitative tool for individuals to retrain their muscles. The Emotiv Software suite is used to recognize thought patterns and convert them into digital commands that Matlab interface communicates to an Arduino Uno processor which activates a particular motor to move the mechanical arm. Exhaustive simulations were performed to ascertain the performance of the BCI based system.