A low-latency neural inference framework for real-time handwriting recognition from EEG signals on an edge device

Abstract

Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) hold significant promise for restoring communication in individuals with severe motor or speech impairments. Imagined handwriting, as a form of motor imagery, offers an intuitive paradigm for character-level neural decoding. While invasive techniques such as electrocorticography (ECoG) offer high decoding accuracy, their surgical requirements pose clinical risks and hinder scalability. Non-invasive alternatives like electroencephalography (EEG) are safer and more accessible but suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and spatial resolution, limiting their effectiveness in high-resolution decoding. Here, we investigate how advanced machine learning, combined with informative feature extraction, can overcome these limitations, enabling EEG-based decoding performance that approaches invasive methods, while supporting real-time inference on edge devices. We present the first real-time, low-latency, high-accuracy system for decoding imagined handwriting from non-invasive EEG signals on a portable edge device. EEG data were collected from 15 participants using a 32-channel headcap and preprocessed with bandpass filtering and artifact subspace reconstruction (ASR). We extracted 85 time domain, frequency domain, and graphical features, then applied Pearson correlation coefficient-based feature selection to reduce latency while preserving accuracy. We developed a hybrid architecture, EEdGeNet, which integrates a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) with a multilayer perceptron (MLP), trained on the extracted features and deployed on the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 for real-time inference. The system achieved accuracy with 914.18 ms per-character inference latency. By selecting only ten key features, the model incurred a minimal accuracy loss of, while achieving a reduction in inference latency (202.62 ms) compared to the full 85-feature set. These findings show that non-invasive EEG, combined with efficient feature and model design, can enable accurate, real-time neural decoding on low-power edge devices, paving the way for practical, portable BCIs.