Development of EEG-Controlled Wheelchair Prototype

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a method of monitoring to record electrical activity of the brain. The advancement of brain technology has seen the collaboration of the EEG and wheelchair to be more realistic which would be a great solution to the increase in number of the person with disabilities yearly especially in Malaysia. However, the price of an EEG headset could be relatively high. This project aims to control the movement of a motorized wheelchair by using brainwave with a low-cost EEG headset to help people with disabilities to move without any muscle stress. The main component is the TGAM chip by Neurosky which acts as the EEG headset. Single electrode is used in this project to capture the brainwave signal with two reference electrodes which are placed at the user’s earlobe. Arduino receives commands wirelessly from the TGAM sensor. Then, motor driver runs the motor according to the program source code written in the Arduino IDE. At the end of the project, a wheelchair control system based on portable EEG signal acquisition module-TGAM is designed, which proves that a mechanical device such as electric wheelchair can be move according to human thoughts. The use of TGAM chip as the headset compared to the EEG headset on the market has seen a 33% decrease in overall commodity prices compare to previous existing project.