Editor’s note: How long before video game players control their actions through a headset rather than with their hands? Can we access and control our laptops or mobile phones or tablets with thought alone?

A research paper from scientists at IBM. Xerox and the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology explores what could be the next big wave to affect our mobile apps: Ones using brain computer interfaces, or BCI. Here’s a look at their paper for our WTW Insider subscribers.

Are there challenges to development of brain computer interfaces coming to mobile devices and apps? Of course?

Are there opportunities? Many.

Much work is being done, and the authors want to package key research to help scientists “consolidate” all that is happening.

“The objective of this paper is to present a survey of the recent work done in the field of applications developed for mobile platforms based on BCI. To the best of our knowledge, this would be a pioneering effort in this direction, which will enable consolidation of research being pursued and draw conclusions on feasible future directions,” they wrote.

The authors are:

  • Sumit Soman, Siddharth Srivastava Department of Electrical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India
  • Saurabh Srivastava Xerox Research Centre Bangalore, India
  • Nitendra Rajput IBM India Research Laboratory New Delhi, India

They note: “The challenges in the use of BCI for gaming applications have been discussed … “

But they add: “Despite these, BCIs have also been used in developing assistive technology, mobile robot control and many other applications.”

Selected parts of the paper, which was published as part of the 9th International Conference on Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction (http://www.iadis.org), follow:

BRAIN COMPUTER INTERFACES FOR MOBILE APPS: STATE-OF-THE-ART & FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Abstract

“In recent times, there have been significant advancements in utilizing the sensing capabilities of mobile devices for developing applications. The primary objective has been to enhance the way a user interacts with the application by making it effortless and convenient. This paper explores the capabilities of using Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI), an evolving subset of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) paradigms, to control mobile devices,” they wrote.

“We present a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art in this area, discussing the challenges and limitations in using BCI for mobile applications. Further we propose possible modalities that in future can benefit with BCI applications. This paper consolidates research directions being pursued in this domain, and draws conclusions on feasibility and benefits of using BCI systems effectively augmented to the mobile application development domain.”

​An Introduction

Advancements in mobile hardware and sensing capabilities have drastically altered the scope of using mobile devices as well as the procedure in which the user interacts with them. Multiple communication modalities, effective HCI paradigms and a versatile communication network have paved the way for building mobile applications which interact with the user in a more ”natural” manner.

The next development appears to be the use of consciously modulated parameters of the human body to communicate with mobile apps, which would make user interaction seamless and intuitive. As one such use case, BCI as a means for HCI on mobile devices is beneficial to enable communication for patients with locomotor disabilities. BCI presents a viable alternative, as conventional communication channels are not available for interacting with mobile platforms. …

There are several challenges in building mobile applications based on BCI systems.

A key challenge is the choice of control paradigm, or precisely, what actions should the user perform which would be detected by the BCI system to execute actions on the mobile application. This is a difficult choice due to the variations in reproducibility of the control intents across users, which directly affects the classification accuracy of the BCI system. Another important challenge is the platform for processing of EEG signals. The EEG signals from acquisition devices are represented as floating point matrices, which have high dimensionality. …

Operations on large matrices require high computational cost. However, the computational power available on mobile platforms is limited, hence the signal-processing pipeline needs to be optimized to suit the platform architecture.

The challenges in the use of BCI for gaming applications have been discussed in the work by Nijholt et al. Despite these, BCIs have also been used in developing assistive technology, mobile robot control and many other applications.

Want more? Read the full paper at:

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1509/1509.01338.pdf