A LabVIEW Based Brain-Computer Interface for Accessing the Internet Resources by Using the Unicorn EEG Headset and the P300 Speller Board

The Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is a multidisciplinary research field aimed at the assistance of people with neuromotor disabilities. This paper presents a new LabVIEW based BCI that should help disabled people to access the Internet by searching a video in YouTube, looking for a person in Facebook, opening a new email, or finding out significant information in Google. These people can achieve such tasks by wearing a GTEC Unicorn EEG headset and focus their sight to the P300 Speller board. This BCI application needs to be user friendly and cost effective. This way the disabled people could benefit of a higher degree of independence because they can communicate by the Internet and leverage the web resources like everyone else. The proposed BCI application consists of the UDP communication protocol employed in LabVIEW to enable the integration of the Unicorn P300 Speller board and the LabVIEW virtual instrument aimed at generating the Internet commands. Then, they should use the official GTEC P300 Speller board that randomly displays different palettes with various flashing symbols. The users need to focus their attention and sight to a single symbol so that they can mentally count all the displayed flashing lights. A symbol is chosen by the P300 Speller board based on the user selection. The UDP packet is sent to LabVIEW application, which is programmed to process these UDP data and link the user selection with the Internet command (search information by Google, search video by YouTube, search person by Facebook, open new email).