BCI Integrated with VR for Rehabilitation

Stroke is one of the leading causes of paralysis. It is defined by being the sudden death of some brain cells due to lack of oxygen when blood flow to the brain is lost. Stroke leaves a large number of people with cognitive, affective and motor impairments depending on assistance in their daily lives. Many studies have proved that motor imagery (MI) based Brain Computer Interface (BCI) is an effective technique for post-stroke rehabilitation. It requires a real time response with high achieved accuracy. In this paper, we present a real time rehabilitation system for post-stroke patients. The system consists of a Virtual Reality (VR) 3D game controlled by a BCI system. We utilized various schemes of pre-processing, features extraction, feature selectors and classifiers to ameliorate the performance of the system for dataset IV 2a [Four class motor imagery (001-2014) - Institute for Knowledge Discovery, Graz University of Technology]. We achieved a maximum accuracy of 79% for the signal processing part using CSP feature extractor and SVM classifier with signal processing time of 0.02 seconds and 0.6 seconds for the response of whole system as a current status.