Abstract
Smart home technology can improve the quality of life for inhabitants of homes. This technology allows the inhabitants to monitor their home and any electrical device locally or remotely via computerized central control. Despite the advances in the smart home technologies, people with disabilities - particularly those with quadriplegia, - will not be able to utilize the currently available techniques. Thus, Brain Computer Interfacing (BCI)-based smart home systems are effective control mechanisms for people with disabilities; since it allows them to cope and adapt with the existed technologies. BCI systems are based on human brain signals instead of physical actions, therefore, people with disabilities will be able to control their house independently. In this paper, a BCI-based smart home system is developed to allow a person who suffer from quadriplegia to open/close doors using brain signals only, which will reduce their need for caregivers. Emotiv Epoc+ was used to detect the user's brain signals. Furthermore, two different suites from Emotiv-the Cognitive Suite and Facial Expressive Suite- were used and tested to deliver the milestones of this technology for people with disabilities. Accordingly, the results of the two suites were analyzed in terms of training time, the ease of generating signals, detection efficiency and user preference to determine which suite is suitable for daily use. Moreover, two prototypes for the developed system were implemented.