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Smart Home Control Using Brain Computer

Interface (BCI)
Mohamad Yusuf Bin Mat Nasir
Faculty of Electrical Engineering
Universiti Teknologi Mara
Shah Alam, Selangor
mohdyusufmatnasir@gmail.com

AbstractSmart home development nowadays is moving

forward in creating the ideal smart homes. Smart home system
had been design especially for those who need a special
attention such as handicapped person, old age person, and
paralysis patients. A braincomputer interface (BCI) is a way
of solution for creating an ideal smart home. The brain
computer interface is a direct communication path between the
brain and the desired controlled device. It enables disabled
people to communicate and interact with their environments
only using their thought [1]. The scope of work for this project
will include the braincomputer interface that had been used
as an input source and control another device via wireless. The
methodology used in the project is based on the knowledge in
the field of computer programming, communication and
embedded system. At last, the result obtain will be used to
create a better solution in the future.
I.

INTRODUCTION

Smart home application and development are never limited.

It always had an improvement in creating a better ideal Smart
home. Smart home systems are created based on analysis on
needs of client and the budget provided for the system. With
all the advance technologies available today, an efficient
system could be achieved. Smart home concept is not new to
the consumers. It has the ability to remotely control any of
electronic and electrical devices without direct contact. This
concept may be applied in various manners to fit the
requirement of a smart home. Now, the improvement in
wireless technology introduced new ideas such as wireless
fidelity (Wi-Fi), Bluetooth and wireless optical networking
technology (Li-Fi), which has been slowly replacing the wired
technology. The main advantages of wireless are it diminish
the need of wires for connection. Basically, smart home
technology was used to control basic electronic systems such
as heating and lighting, but nowadays the more smart
technology has been introduced to the consumer so that almost
any existing electrical component can be included in the
system. In addition, smart home technology does not simply
turn the devices state (on/off), it also can used to monitor the
surrounding environment and the activities that are being done
while the house is occupied or empty. The result of these
modifications to the technology is that a smart home can now
monitor all activities occur inside the house and decide the
suitable action to be taken. Smart home technology uses many

of the same devices in order to build an environment in which

many features in the home can be operated automatically and
the devices can communicate with each other freely.

II. PROBLEM STATEMENT

Handicapped person, old age person, and paralysis patients
have several different problem for themselves. Some of them
suffer motion disability problem and some suffer voice or
vision disability problem. This will cause the person who
suffer with this type of disability to have several problem with
their surroundings. Some of these people are unable to do
thing like normal people do. They need a system that help
them to regain the full control like normal person. Hence an
alternative solution is introduce by using the Brain Computer
Interface (BCI). The main purpose of the system is to detect
an electrical pulse around the forehead region and identify the
changes in electrical pulse activity inside the brain in order to
decide what the action to be taken. As a proof of the concept,
the system will be able to control several different device like
hardware or the computer based system.
III. LITERATURE REVIEW
Many environmental control systems were suggested and
applied for people with disability to control their surroundings
[2]. Radio frequency identification and voice recognition [3]
are some example of these systems. These systems work well
for people with motion disability problem while the same
system will not work for some people with voice or vision
disability problem. For these reason, an alternative control
systems was proposed. It using humans physiological state to
solve the problem. This system is called as Brain Computer
Interface System (BCI). Some of the example using this
system is the author in [4] proposed a BCI system to help
disabled people to visualize the phone numbers using the
brain. The system is where twelve buttons of number are
illuminated in front of the user. The user then can input a
phone number only by gazing at these buttons.

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IV. METHODOLOGY
The Brain Computer Interface (BCI) can be used for
helping disabled people, however the rate of succession
achieved is above 80%. This means that there still 10-20%
error rate. This error may result in loosing user control. Hence
to avoid this error, this project propose a very simple and
effective method for smart home control. A simple flow chart
of a brain controlled smart home system is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 2 will show the NeuroSky Mind wave headset and
figure 3 show how the headset communicate with the Arduino
board.
Figure 2: Mind wave Mobile Device

Figure 3: The communication path between the Mind wave

headset.

V. SIGNAL ACQUISITION

Figure 1: Flow Chart Control Smart Home System

For signal acquisition the Mind wave headset is used. It has

one electroencephalogram (EEG) electrode and the reference
electrode. It has a built-in Bluetooth transceiver and connected
to the Arduino board. Figure 2 shows the NeuroSky Mind
wave headset and the location of the electrodes.
The NeuroSky Mind wave headset includes the sensor on
the forehead, the contact and reference points located on the
ear, and also the onboard chip that processes all of the data
and provides this data in digital form. This onboard chip called
as ThinkGear chip. Both the raw brainwaves and the e-Sense
Meters (Attention and Meditation) are calculated on the
ThinkGear chip. [5]
The aim of this project is to acquire and identify the EEG
signal that need to be used to control the smart home system.
In this project a simple feature have used. Eye blink feature
was used for the device selection either device 1 or device 2.
So after the user apply the eye blink, the selected device are
ready to be control. After that the attention feature are used to
turn on or turn off the selected devices. For every eye blink
will be counted and it result are used for the selection of
device. Below is the table for eye blink selection. [5]

Table 1: Blinking Eye Device Selection

VI. BLOCK DIAGRAM

Figure 6: First eye blinking, blue Led turn on

Figure 4: Block Diagram of the System

Figure 4 above show the block diagram of the system

VII. RESULT
Figure 7: Second eye blinking, green led turn on

Figure 5: Blinking LED circuit with both led turn off

Fig 8: The actual data from Mind wave Mobile

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These smart home system controls by the brainwave can
become the most development program in near future for
smart home system. It will become the most advantages for
the disable people to use of the user that need to use this
system. In addition it will also result in an increase in demand
of consumer electronics devices that can be easily interfaced
with BCI systems.

IX. CONCLUSION

Figure 9: The expected actual data receive from the Mind

wave Mobile

The result obtain can be classify into two part which is the
blink eye and the attention part. For the blink eye part, figure 5
shows how the connection had been made in order to test the
application of the feature from the mind wave in the smart
home system. In figure 6 and figure 7 show the result when
the eye blink were successfully detected and it will turn on the
blue led and then turn on the other another led depending on
the number of blink.
For the attention part figure 8 above shows the actual data
receive from the Mind wave Mobile device and figure 9 show
the expected data receive from the Mind wave Mobile. The
data receive are inconsistent, this data cannot be used to
control another device in the smart home system. The data
should be alike to the expected data receive from the Mind
wave Mobile. Hence, the attention feature are unable to be
added to the smart home system due to the data in consistency.
All of these test are done by using Arduino. By using these
data, the user are able to control thing by using the Brainwave
Computer Interface. A set of instruction are created based on
these data from mind wave mobile.

VIII. DISCUSSION
The main purpose of this project is to develop the
implementation of EEG signal to control the home application,
smart home system. Eye blinking and attention feature from
the Mind wave Mobile Headset were selected to be used in the
smart home system. These feature required the user to blink
and focus on the object in order to change the switching state.
From the result obtain, the blinking feature were successfully
added to the system but the attention feature are unable to
produce the expected data. The attention data receive from the
headset should be in good quality but at the end the data
receive are in bad quality.

The data analyze from the brain activity can be used for
creating algorithms for brain-computer interfaces (BCI). A
brain computer interface is a system that allows a person to
control an electronic object by using only their thought. A
certain types of BCI help people to control their home
application or anything example like mini games in computer.
This BCI device has a built-in library that controls all activity.
This technology built-in chip capture the EEG signal from
brain activity or recording the brain electricity activity and
sent the signal via Bluetooth for been used in smart home
system. Recently, EEG sensors have been commercialized.
Some company use BCI application in creating a game that a
player can control everything on the screen with the help of a
build-in BCI headset. This BCI application can be use in
helping more people solving their problem.

X. FUTURE RECOMMENDATION
Signal acquisition process can be troublesome if the device
used are unable to analyst the data accurately. More accurate
device are recommended to be used for solving this type of
problem. Another recommendation is to improve the data
manipulation in order to create a better smart home concept.
More feature need to be created in order to create an ideal
smart home system.
REFERENCES
[1] S.P.Pande1, Prof.Pravin Sen , Home Automation System For
Disabled People Using BCI. 2014
[2] S. Helal, W. Mann, H. E. Zabadani, J. King, Y. Kaddoura, and
E. Jansen, The gator tech smart house: A programmable
pervasive space, IEEE Comput. Soc., vol. 38, pp. 50-60, 2005.
[3] C. Yerrapragada and P. S. Fisher, Voice controlled smart
house, IEEE Int. Conf. on Consumer Electronics, vol. 1, pp.
154-155, 1993.
[4] M. Cheng, X. R. GAO, S. K. GAO, and D. F. Xu, Design and
Implementation of a Brain-computer Interface with High
Transfer Rates, IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng., vol. 49, pp. 11811186, 2002.
[5] "Interfacing
Mindwave
Mobile
with
Arduino".
Pantechsolutions.net. N.p., 2016. Web. 4 June 2016.