A Comparative Pilot Study on ErrPs for Different Usage Conditions of an Exoskeleton with a Mobile EEG Device

Abstract

Exoskeletons and prosthetic devices controlled using brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) can be prone to errors due to inconsistent decoding. In recent years, it has been demonstrated that error-related potentials (ErrPs) can be used as a feedback signal in electroencephalography (EEG) based BCIs. However, modern BCIs often take large setup times and are physically restrictive, making them impractical for everyday use. In this paper, we use a mobile and easy-to-setup EEG device to investigate whether an erroneously functioning 1-DOF exoskeleton in different conditions, namely, visually observing and wearing the exoskeleton, elicits a brain response that can be classified. We develop a pipeline that can be applied to these two conditions and observe from our experiments that there is evidence for neural responses from electrodes near regions associated with ErrPs in an environment that resembles the real world. We found that these error-related responses can be classified as ErrPs with accuracies ranging from 60% to 71%, depending on the condition and the subject. Our pipeline could be further extended to detect and correct erroneous exoskeleton behavior in real-world settings.