A Wearable Device for Brain–Machine Interaction with Augmented Reality Head-Mounted Display

Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) have started to enter the consumer market with appealing head-mounted devices, primarily aiming at entertainment applications. However, the accuracy and information rate of those devices prevent their employment in fields where reliability and real-time constraints are stronger, such as robotic control and closed-loop human–machine interaction (HMI). In this paper, we present an entirely wearable, hands-free, embedded BCI system based on steady state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs), integrating augmented reality (AR) for stimuli presentation, with a custom low-power board for EEG signal acquisition and real-time processing. The system has been tested on five subjects with four target stimuli, achieving high overall accuracy (80%) and an average transfer rate of 0.42 bits per second.