Total Design of an FPGA-Based Brain–Computer Interface Control Hospital Bed Nursing System

This paper proposes an asynchronous steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based hospital bed nursing system without training from the users. The proposed system can be easily applied to any kinds of electrical hospital beds and can help the user to control the attitude of the hospital bed by only staring at the flashing panel. Different from most brain-computer interface (BCI) systems consisting of commercial instruments, this study provides a total design solution. The system firstly presents a light-emitting-diode stimulation panel to induce the user´s SSVEP signal used as the input signal of the proposed system. Then, an SSVEP-amplifier/filter circuit and a field-programmable-gate-array-based SSVEP signal processor are respectively designed to acquire and process the subject´s SSVEP. Moreover, H-bridge dc motor drive circuit is implemented to adjust the attitude of the hospital bed. Eventually, 15 subjects are invited to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed BCI-based hospital bed control nursing system. The total design BCI system shows good performance with an average accuracy of 92.5% and an average command transfer interval of 5.22 s per command.