Recognition of Brain Waves of Left and Right Hand Movement Imagery with Portable Electroencephalographs

With the development of the modern society, mind control applied to both the recovery of disabled individuals and auxiliary control of normal people has obtained great attention in numerous researches. In our research, we attempt to recognize the brain waves of left and right hand movement imagery with portable electroencephalographs. Considering the inconvenience of wearing traditional multiple-electrode electroencephalographs, we choose Muse to collect data which is a portable headband launched lately with a number of useful functions and channels and it is much easier for the public to use. Additionally, previous researches generally focused on discrimination of EEG of left and right hand movement imagery by using data from C3 and C4 electrodes which locate on the top of the head. However, we choose the gamma wave channels of F7 and F8 and obtain data when subjects imagine their left or right hand to move with their eyeballs rotated in the corresponding direction. With the help of the Common Space Pattern algorithm to extract features of brain waves between left and right hand movement imagery, we make use of the Support Vector Machine to classify different brain waves. Traditionally, the accuracy rate of classification was approximately 90% using the EEG data from C3 and C4 electrode poles; however, the accuracy rate reaches 95.1% by using the gamma wave data from F7 and F8 in our experiment. Finally, we design a plane program in Python where a plane can be controlled to go left or right when users imagine their left or right hand to move. 8 subjects are tested and all of them can control the plane flexibly which reveals that our model can be applied to control hardware which is useful for disabled individuals and normal people.