Eye Blink Classification for Assisting Disability to Communicate Using Bagging and Boosting

Abstract

Disability is a physical or mental impairment. People with disability have more barriers to do certain activity than those without disability. Moreover, several conditions make them having difficulty to communicate with other people. Currently, researchers have helped people with disabilities by developing brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, which uses artifact on electroencephalograph (EEG) as a communication tool using blinks. Research on eye blinks has only focused on the threshold and peak amplitude, while the difference in how many blinks can be detected using peak amplitude has not been the focus yet. This study used primary data taken using a Muse headband on 15 subjects. This data was used as a dataset classified using bagging (random forest) and boosting (XGBoost) methods with python; 80% of the data was allocated for learning and 20% was for testing. The classified data was divided into ten times of testing, which were then averaged. The number of eye blinks’ classification results showed that the accuracy value using random forest was 77.55%, and the accuracy result with the XGBoost method was 90.39%. The result suggests that the experimental model is successful and can be used as a reference for making applications that help people to communicate by differentiating the number of eye blinks. This research focused on developing the number of eye blinks. However, in this study, only three blinking were used so that further research could increase these number.