Development of a Wireless Embedded Brain - Computer Interface and Its Application on Drowsiness Detection and Warning

The existing bio-signal monitoring systems are mostly designed for signal recording without the capability of automatic analysis so that their applications are limited. The goal of this paper is to develop a real-time wireless embedded electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring system that includes multichannel physiological acquisition, wireless transmission, and an embedded system. The wireless transmission can overcome the inconvenience of wire routing and the embedded multi-task scheduling for the dual-core processing system is developed to realize the real-time processing. The whole system has been applied to detect the driver's drowsiness for demonstration since drowsiness is considered as a serious cause of many traffic accidents. The electroencephalogram (EEG) features changes from wakefulness to drowsiness are extracted to detect the driver's drowsiness and an on-line warning feedback module is applied to avoid disasters caused by fatigue.