Enhancement of Movement Intention Detection Using EEG Signals Responsive to Emotional Music Stimulus

Recent psychological and neurological studies suggest that human motor preparation and execution are largely affected by the subjective emotional state. Thus, external emotion stimuli can be a potential tool to enhance the detectability of movement intention from pre-movement neural signals. This article investigated whether emotion-evoking music stimulus could improve the performances of a fully predictive Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) system for movement intention detection. For this purpose, electro encephalo graphical (EEG) signals were recorded from twelve healthy subjects under three emotional conditions: happy, sad, and neutral. The emotions were elicited using external music stimuli while they performed a wrist extension action. Additionally, support vector machine-based offline and pseudo online testing schemes were employed to solve a binary classification problem for determining movement intention from pre-movement EEG. EEG power analysis showed that happy music stimulus resulted in an early occurrence of event-related desynchronization in alpha band compared to other emotional states. Happy emotional stimuli also resulted in comparatively better performances in both offline and pseudo online testing paradigms. The results of this article suggest that external happy music stimulus could enhance the early and accurate detectability of human self-paced movement intention and thus could contribute to the predictive capability of state-of-the-art assistive BCIs.