Harmonic enhancement to optimize EOG based ocular activity decoding: A hybrid approach with harmonic source separation and EEMD

Intelligent robotic systems for patients with motor impairments have gained significant interest over the past few years. Various sensor types and human-machine interface (HMI) methods have been developed; however, most research in this area has focused on eye-blink-based binary control with minimal electrode placements. This approach restricts the complexity of HMI systems and does not consider the potential of multiple-activity decoding via static ocular activities. These activities pose a decoding challenge due to non-oscillatory noise components, such as muscle tremors or fatigue. To address this issue, a hybrid preprocessing methodology is proposed that combines harmonic source separation and ensemble empirical mode decomposition in the time-frequency domain to remove percussive and non-oscillatory components of static ocular movements. High-frequency components are included in the harmonic enhancement process. Next, a machine learning model with dual input of time-frequency images and a vectorized feature set of consecutive time windows is employed, leading to a 3.8% increase in performance as compared to without harmonic enhancement in leave-one-session-out cross-validation (LOSO). Additionally, a high correlation is found between the harmonic ratios of the static activities in the Hilbert-Huang frequency spectrum and LOSO performances. This finding highlights the potential of leveraging the harmonic characteristics of the activities as a discriminating factor in machine learning-based classification of EOG-based ocular activities, thus providing a new aspect of activity enrichment with minimal performance loss for future HMI systems.