Project summary

Ageing becomes disability and dependence as time goes by. This project suggests a transdisciplinary approach to address the problem of increasing ageing and its effects on activities of daily living (ADLs). Engineers, physicians, therapists and, more important, direct participation of elderly people, will together accomplish all tasks involved in this study.

A Brain Computer Interface (BCI) is a communication system that monitors the brain activity and translates specific signal features that reflect the user’s intent into commands that operate a device. BCI systems could be useful for elderly people in two ways:

• Training their cognitive abilities for preventing the ageing effects.
• Controlling electronic and domotic devices that might be available in their usual environment, increasing their personal autonomy to perform ADL.

The BCI-Ageing project has two main purposes. Firstly, the aim is to develop a cognitive training application using a sensorimotor-based BCI system that requires extensive training. Thus, the interaction of users with this application could be a suitable training to prevent cognitive impairment. Proposed cognitive training tasks will be divided into different subsets and difficulty levels, in order to assess the progress of the user skills. Additionally, a simulated domotic environment controlled through the proposed mental tasks would make the application more attractive for users. Secondly, the project has the aim to develop a P300-based BCI domotic application to assist dependent elderly people who have severe impairments to interact with their environment. Therefore, they will be able to control lights, heating, ventilation, a TV set, a DVD player, a Hi-Fi system, a multimedia hard drive and a telephone, increasing their independence and autonomy. Both applications will be tested and evaluated by elderly people from the “Centro de Referencia Estatal de Discapacidad y Dependencia (CRE-DyD)” Centre located in León (Spain). Finally, the influence of previous cognitive training on the use of the BCI-based assistive application will be evaluated.