自然視条件下脳波計測の精度向上を可能にする眼球運動情報を用いた解析方法に関する研究

摘要

As the technique of electroencephalogram (EEG) developed for such many years, its application spreads and permeates into different areas, such like, clinical diagnosis, brain-computer interface, mental state estimation, and so on. Recently, using EEG as a tool for estimate people’s mental state and its extensional applications have jump into the limelight. These practical applications are urgently needed because the lack of subjectively estimating methods for the so called metal states, such as the concentration during study, the cognitive workload in driving, the calmness under mental training and so on. On the other hand, the application of EEG signals under daily life conditions especially when eye movements are totally without any constrains under a ‘fully free-view’ condition are obedient to the traditional ocular artifact suppression methods and how it meets the neuroscience standard has not been clearly expounded. This cause the ambiguities of explaining the obtain data and lead to susceptive results from data analysis. In our research, based on the basic idea of employing and extending EEG as the main tool for the estimation to mental state for daily life use, we confirmed the direction sensitivity of ocular artifacts induced by various types of eye movements and showed the most sensitive areas to the influence from it by multi zone-of-view experiment with standard neuroscience-targeted EEG devices. Enlightened from the results, we extended heuristic result on the use of more practical portable EEG devices. Besides, for a more realistic solution of the EEG based mental state estimation which is supposed to be applied for daily life environment, we studied the signal processing techniques of artifact suppression on low density electrode EEG and showed the importance of taking direction/eye position information into account when ocular artifact removal/suppression. In summary, this thesis has helped pave the practical way of using EEG signals toward the general use in daily life which has irregular eye movement patterns. We also pointed out the view-direction sensitivity of ocular artifact which helps the future studies to overcome the difficulties imposed on EEG applications by the free-view EEG tasks.