Towards an Ecologically Valid Symbiosis of BCI and Head-mounted VR Displays

Abstract

We present and discuss a user-friendly wearable brain-computer interface (BCI) system with a head-mounted virtual reality display (HMD) for motor rehabilitation of post-stroke patients. The described design represents the first building block toward developing a low-power wearable and ecologically valid BCI-HMD system for collaborative neurorehabilitation of motor and cognitive impairments. We discuss the system's main hardware and software components and applied methods leading to extracting and classifying the task-relevant electroencephalo-graphic (EEG) brain waves used to control the HMD virtual reality environment. Pilot results using the system are also described.