A real-time wireless brain-computer interface system for drowsiness detection.

A real-time wireless electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) system for drowsiness detection has been proposed. Drowsy driving has been implicated as a causal factor in many accidents. Therefore, real-time drowsiness monitoring can prevent traffic accidents effectively. However, current BCI systems are usually large and have to transmit an EEG signal to a back-end personal computer to process the EEG signal. In this study, a novel BCI system was developed to monitor the human cognitive state and provide biofeedback to the driver when drowsy state occurs. The proposed system consists of a wireless physiological signal-acquisition module and an embedded signal-processing module. Here, the physiological signal-acquisition module and embedded signal-processing module were designed for long-term EEG monitoring and real-time drowsiness detection, respectively. The advantages of low owner consumption and small volume of the proposed system are suitable for car applications. Moreover, a real-time drowsiness detection algorithm was also developed and implemented in this system. The experiment results demonstrated the feasibility of our proposed BCI system in a practical driving application.