Do acupuncture points provide better or worse electrode locations for BCI?

One of the studies we did at JPL during the Summer was to investigate the effect of supposed acupuncture nodes on scalp electrode/skin impedance (which may result in unusual EEG readings). We could only do a limited number of measurements due to the limitations of the equipment we had with us.

Lois Clark (a student) volunteered to be the subject of the tests. Below is the motage we were able to put together. It places 6 electrodes approximately 1cm apart in the area of a well-known acupuncture point.

We found nothing significant (albeit with one participant only), but a larger study will be run in the future before the hypothesis can be ruled out.

Some of our researchers visiting JPL

Here is a picture of some of our team members visiting NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in July 2012, just when the Curiosity was approaching Mars. For the occasion JPL set up a display of copies (some in scale, some 1:1) of various rovers which over the years have been launched by NASA.

From right to left: Riccardo Poli, Caterina Cinel, and Francisco Sepulveda (all from Essex), Adrian Stoica (our main collaborator at JPL) and Luis Clark (a student who acted a few times as a subject for our experiments at JPL).

Riccardo and Francisco's visit to JPL

Francisco and Riccardo visited Adrian Stoica's lab at JLP in late May 2012 interacting particularly with Adrian but also Christopher Assad (he is specifically interested in EMG applications to robotic control and prosthesis) and other people.

They were also invited to give a tutorial on BCI to get people in the lab up to speed on the state-of-the-art and recent developments in the field.

The seminar was entitled "Brain Signals + Evolutionary Computation = Human Competitive Brain Computer Interfaces". Here is a summary:

The keyboard and mouse provide us with reliable, but unnatural forms of input, being primitive transducer of muscular movement. People who lack muscle control cannot used them.  Wouldn't it be nice some day to be able to replace the mouse and keyboard with systems capable of directly interpreting the intentions of computer users from their
brain activity? 

This is the goal of the field of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI). Unfortunately, this goal is hampered by a number of problems: brain signals are typically extremely noisy, they vary in location and temporal dynamics from subject to subject, they depend on the age,
tiredness, attention, food and drug intake of subjects, etc. So, even the best BCIs are extremely slow and prone to misinterpret user intentions.

In this seminar we will briefly review the different approaches to BCI, with particular attention to non-invasive EEG-based BCIs, highlighting their difficulties and limitations. We will then illustrate a number of cases from our own research in the Essex BCI group, where evolutionary algorithms and genetic programming in particular have helped develop systems which are competitive with human-designed ones, thereby accelerating the development of practical BCI technology.

Potential Simulators for the Project

Caterina and I (Riccardo) have done a search of space flight simulators, particularly focusing on anything written in Python or that can be interfaced to Python (since this is the language we have used for our BCI Analogue Mouse system).

Here is a preliminary list:

• JPL have developed and used in a number of missions their own simulators. Two have caught my eye:
• DARTS (which stands for Dynamics Algorithms for Real-Time Simulation) a general simulator for multi body dynamics (and on which other simulators are based). This could be very good for simulating the flying of a spacecraft.
• ROAMS (which stands for Rover Analysis, Modeling and Simulation) which would be good for simulating rovers performing missions on a planet or something.
• Vega Strike is a sort of a game of space exploration and missions. I've downloaded and installed version 0.5.1 on Ubuntu and it worked really well (note: I did not get it from the ubuntu repositories, since that is partly broken). Apparently one can create missions by Python scripting, but I haven't got round to test that. It would give us the possibility of running really realistic simulations. (One issue to consider is whether our BCI Mouse software would interact ok with it, since it grabs the mouse pointer and goes full screen.)
• Space Commander is a physically realistic simulator of space travel entirely written in Python. I've already committed and adapted version 0.4 of the simulator (see changesets r3 and r4). Because it is written in Python and it is very compact I would suggest to use it to do the first few experiments. (Incidentally, it uses pygame, which I think is the same package Psychopy uses: Psychopy is used for stimulus presentation etc. in our BCI Mouse.)

Some Potential for Assisted Living

The research in the area of Brain Computer Interfaces to be carried out in this project may also have an impact on Assisted Living. We will try to exploit its results within the Ageing and Assisted Living Network of the University of Essex.

We will use our analogue BCI mouse for this project

In earlier research (partly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, EPSRC) we developed an analogue Brain Computer Interface for cursor control which we call the Essex BCI Mouse. We have decided to use it as a starting point to build some of the control and navigation applications to be explored in this project.

Here is a short video we produced last year to illustrate the operations of our BCI mouse:

More information on the BCI Mouse project is available here.

Adrian Stoica and the JPL Advanced Robotic Controls Group

General

Here is Adrian's webpage and the Advanced Robotic Controls Group's page. They are interested in:

• Human-robot interfaces and controls using biological signals such as EMG and EEG
• Mobility algorithms, planning and navigation for underwater, surface, and aerial robotic platforms
• Robot intelligence, behavior control, robot learning, cognition and decision making, including distributed reasoning and optimal control for cooperative robots

Interest in Biological Interfaces

In the area of biological interfaces they have Christopher Assad and Michael Wolf with an interest in the area. Also, one of their key projects is entitled Bioelectric Sensor Arrays for Reliable Prosthetic Interface sponsored by DARPA. It is mostly about EMG, but the objectives are similar to those of BCI.

Facilities

They have a number of robotic arenas and a very sophisticated simulator called DARTS.