Due to the advent of easy-to-use, portable, and cost-effective brain signal sensing devices, pervasive Brain-Machine Interface (BMI) applications using Electroencephalogram (EEG) are growing rapidly. The main objectives of these applications are: 1) pervasive collection of brain data from multiple users, 2) processing the collected data to recognize the corresponding mental states, and 3) providing real-time feedback to the end users, activating an actuator, or information harvesting by enterprises for further services. Developing BMI applications faces several challenges, such as cumbersome setup procedure, low signal-to-noise ratio, insufficient signal samples for analysis, and long processing times. Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies provide the opportunity to solve these challenges through large scale data collection, fast data transmission, and computational offloading.

This research proposes an IoT-based framework, called BraiNet, that provides a standard design methodology for fulfilling the pervasive BMI applications requirements including: accuracy, timeliness, energy-efficiency, security, and dependability. BraiNet applies Machine Learning (ML) based solutions (e.g. classifiers and predictive models) to: 1) improve the accuracy of mental state detection on-the-go, 2) provide real-time feedback to the users, and 3) save power on mobile platforms. However, BraiNet inherits security breaches of IoT, due to applying off-the-shelf soft/hardware, high accessibility, and massive network size. ML algorithms, as the core technology for mental state recognition, are among the main targets for cyber attackers. Novel ML security solutions are proposed and added to BraiNet, which provide analytical methodologies for tuning the ML hyper-parameters to be secure against attacks.

To implement these solutions, two main optimization problems are solved: 1) maximizing accuracy, while minimizing delays and power consumption, and 2) maximizing the ML security, while keeping its accuracy high. Deep learning algorithms, delay and power models are developed to solve the former problem, while gradient-free optimization techniques, such as Bayesian optimization are applied for the latter. To test the framework, several BMI applications are implemented, such as EEG-based drivers fatigue detector (SafeDrive), EEG-based identification and authentication system (E-BIAS), and interactive movies that adapt to viewers mental states (nMovie). The results from the experiments on the implemented applications show the successful design of pervasive BMI applications based on the BraiNet framework.

In recent years, deep learning systems have outperformed traditional machine learning systems in most domains. There has been a lot of research recently in the field of hand gesture recognition using wearable sensors due to the numerous advantages these systems have over vision-based ones. However, due to the lack of extensive datasets and the nature of the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data, there are difficulties in applying deep learning techniques to them. Although many machine learning models have good accuracy, most of them assume that training data is available for every user while other works that do not require user data have lower accuracies. MirrorGen is a technique which uses wearable sensor data and generates synthetic videos using hand movements and it mitigates the traditional challenges of vision based recognition such as occlusion, lighting restrictions, lack of viewpoint variations, and environmental noise. In addition, MirrorGen allows for user-independent recognition involving minimal human effort during data collection. It also helps leverage the advances in vision-based recognition by using various techniques like optical flow extraction, 3D convolution. Projecting the orientation (IMU) information to a video helps in gaining position information of the hands. To validate these claims, we perform entropy analysis on various configurations such as raw data, stick model, hand model and real video. Human hand model is found to have an optimal entropy that helps in achieving user independent recognition. It also serves as a pervasive option as opposed to a video-based recognition. The average user independent recognition accuracy of 99.03% was achieved for a sign language dataset with 59 different users, 20 different signs with 20 repetitions each for a total of 23k training instances. Moreover, synthetic videos can be used to augment real videos to improve recognition accuracy.