Prototype Design and Implementation of an Automatic Control System Based on a BCI

In recent years, automatic control based on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have attracted much attention as a useful tool to control external devices just by a user's intent. A BCI system detects electrical signals produced from the human brain and converts them into control signals to operate a device by reading the user's thoughts. In this paper, we propose a prototype of an automatic control system (ACS) that controls vehicle sensors through the application of a BCI to a vehicle system for remote sensor control. The proposed system is designed and implemented using several components, including a BCI device, a server system, a smart app, and a car control panel, so that it can be applied to smart car operations. The BCI device is used to transmit a user's brain waves through an Arduino UNO board to a server system and it also provides a Bluetooth interface. The server system receives digital brain wave signals from the BCI device and presents them in a graph. The smart app receives normalized brain waves from the server system by the Bluetooth protocol and controls the smart car through a control panel by using brain wave information. The control panel of the smart car uses an ATMega128 board to operate the vehicle based on commands from the smart app through Bluetooth. The proposed BCI-based automatic control system (B-ACS) can be applied to short-range transport models for disabled users and it is expected to be of great assistance in improving the quality of their daily lives.