Two publications by staff from the Centre for Biomedical Cybernetics were presented at the flagship conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society
The research team leading Malta-based work on the Sino-Malta project attended the 47th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC).
This project is focused on research into signal processing and machine learning methods for improving the identification of imagined speech from brain signals recorded through electroencephalography (EEG), which involves placing sensors on the scalp.
The conference took place at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark, from 14 to 17 July. The IEEE EMBC conference is a leading event in the field of biomedical engineering and is the flagship conference of the EMBC.
The team in attendance consisted of members of staff from the Centre for Biomedical Cybernetics, namely Prof. Kenneth Camilleri as the principal investigator, Prof. Tracey Camilleri as senior researcher, Dr Natasha Padfield as RSO III, Dr Stefanie Türk as a part-time RSO III, and Mr Kamran Mujahid as RSO II.
The team presented two papers at the conference. On Monday 14 July, Dr Türk presented a poster for the paper titled ‘Word-Specific Properties Affect Classification Performance in Brain Computer Interfaces for Decoding Imagined Speech from EEG’. This study linked the age at which words are typically learnt (age of acquisition) and how often the words are used in general speech (word frequency) with classification performance in an imagined speech brain-computer interface (BCI). This analysis can guide researchers in making better decisions about the words used as prompts in imagined speech BCIs.
On Thursday 17 July, Dr Padfield presented the paper ‘A Spatio-Spectral Analysis of Decoding Imagined Speech from the Idle State’ as an oral presentation. This study investigated the scalp regions and frequency bands that were most important when distinguishing between imagined speech and the idle state, i.e. when the participant is not executing imagined speech. This investigation contributes to the development of real-time BCIs in which the participant can execute commands at will.
SIDec is a collaborative project between the Centre for Biomedical Cybernetics at the University of Malta, and the Computer Science Department at Hangzhou Dianzi University in China.
It received funding from Xjenza Malta and the Ministry for Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China (MOST), through the SINO-MALTA Fund 2023 Call (Science and Technology Cooperation).
