title: Pervasive brain monitoring and data sharing based on multi-tier distributed computing and linked data technology.
abstract: EEG-based Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are facing basic challenges in real-world applications. The technical difficulties in developing truly wearable BCI systems that are capable of making reliable real-time prediction of users' cognitive states in dynamic real-life situations may seem almost insurmountable at times. Fortunately, recent advances in miniature sensors, wireless communication and distributed computing technologies offered promising ways to bridge these chasms. In this paper, we report an attempt to develop a pervasive on-line EEG-BCI system using state-of-art technologies including multi-tier Fog and Cloud Computing, semantic Linked Data search, and adaptive prediction/classification models. To verify our approach, we implement a pilot system by employing wireless dry-electrode EEG headsets and MEMS motion sensors as the front-end devices, Android mobile phones as the personal user interfaces, compact personal computers as the near-end Fog Servers and the computer clusters hosted by the Taiwan National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) as the far-end Cloud Servers. We succeeded in conducting synchronous multi-modal global data streaming in March and then running a multi-player on-line EEG-BCI game in September, 2013. We are currently working with the ARL Translational Neuroscience Branch to use our system in real-life personal stress monitoring and the UCSD Movement Disorder Center to conduct in-home Parkinson's disease patient monitoring experiments. We shall proceed to develop the necessary BCI ontology and introduce automatic semantic annotation and progressive model refinement capability to our system.
authors.affiliation: Pervasive Embedded Technology Lab, Computer Science Department, National Chiao Tung University Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C.
authors.forename: John K
authors.initials: JK
authors.lastname: Zao
authors.affiliation: Pervasive Embedded Technology Lab, Computer Science Department, National Chiao Tung University Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C.
authors.forename: Tchin-Tze
authors.initials: TT
authors.lastname: Gan
authors.affiliation: Pervasive Embedded Technology Lab, Computer Science Department, National Chiao Tung University Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C.
authors.forename: Chun-Kai
authors.initials: CK
authors.lastname: You
authors.affiliation: Pervasive Embedded Technology Lab, Computer Science Department, National Chiao Tung University Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C.
authors.forename: Cheng-En
authors.initials: CE
authors.lastname: Chung
authors.affiliation: Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, University of California San Diego, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Yu-Te
authors.initials: YT
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Pervasive Embedded Technology Lab, Computer Science Department, National Chiao Tung University Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C.
authors.forename: Sergio José
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Rodríguez Méndez
authors.affiliation: Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, University of California San Diego, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Tim
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Mullen
authors.affiliation: Pervasive Embedded Technology Lab, Computer Science Department, National Chiao Tung University Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C.
authors.forename: Chieh
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.affiliation: Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, University of California San Diego, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Kothe
authors.affiliation: Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, Academia Sinica Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.
authors.forename: Ching-Teng
authors.initials: CT
authors.lastname: Hsiao
authors.affiliation: National Center for High-performance Computing Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C.
authors.forename: San-Liang
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Chu
authors.affiliation: National Center for High-performance Computing Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C.
authors.forename: Ce-Kuen
authors.initials: CK
authors.lastname: Shieh
authors.affiliation: Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, University of California San Diego, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Tzyy-Ping
authors.initials: TP
authors.lastname: Jung
keywords: Cloud Computing; Fog Computing; bio-sensors; brain computer interfaces; linked data; machine-to-machine communication; semantic sensor web