A Mind Operated Computer Mouse Using Discrete Wavelet Transforms for Elderly People with Multiple Disabilities

According to a statistical survey made by World Health Organization (WHO) India suffers from highest number of road accidents and out of which more than ten percent of them are prone to head injuries. This scenario leads to patient's death or make the victim to become comatose. Also, many different disorders can disrupt the neuromuscular channels through which the brain communicates with and controls its external environment. Brainstem stroke or spinal cord injury, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophies, multiple sclerosis and numerous other diseases impair the neural pathways leading to communication and control which make the victims intellectually or physically disabled. Most often, the communication for paralyzed people is established by using a Brain Control Interface (BCI). Most of the existing systems had experimented Brain Computer Interface either with animals or healthy human beings. But, this paper focuses on movements of the mouse cursor controlled by a person with multiple disabilities. The mouse cursor movement would further be used by the disabled person to have a communication with his caretaker by means of the software developed by us. The proposed system uses discrete wavelet transforms for de-noising the muscular and cardiac signals. An independent component analysis is performed in order to extract the beta rhythms from the EEG signal. The mouse control is achieved by interfacing the mouse with a microcontroller which receives the operating voltages from the Data Acquisition System (DAS) which acquires and conditions the EEG signals coming from the user brain. The proposed system is tested on several young and elderly persons and is found to be working with more than 95% accuracy.