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Background: Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) has been an important field of research in recent years, since machines will continue to be embedded in many human actvities in several contexts, such as industry and healthcare. Monitoring in an ecological mannerthe cognitive workload (CW) of users, who interact with machines, is crucial to assess their level of engagement in activities and the required effort, with the goal of preventing stressful circumstances. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the assessment of CW using wearable sensors in HMI. Methods: this narrative review explores several techniques and procedures for collecting physiological data through wearable sensors with the possibility to integrate these multiple physiological signals, providing a multimodal monitoring of the individuals’CW. Finally, it focuses on the impact of artificial intelligence methods in the physiological signals data analysis to provide models of the CW to be exploited in HMI. Results: the review provided a comprehensive evaluation of the wearables, physiological signals, and methods of data analysis for CW evaluation in HMI. Conclusion: the literature highlighted the feasibility of employing wearable sensors to collect physiological signals for an ecological CW monitoring in HMI scenarios. However, challenges remain in standardizing these measures across different populations and contexts.

The ability to control external devices through thought is increasingly becoming a reality. Human beings can use the electrical signals of their brain to interact or change the surrounding environment and more. The development of this technology called brain-computer interface (BCI) will increasingly allow people with motor disabilities to communicate or use assistive devices to walk, manipulate objects and communicate. Using data from the PhysioNet database, this study implemented a pattern classification system for use in a BCI on 109 healthy volunteers during real movement activities and motor imagery recorded by 64-channels electroencephalography (EEG) system. Different classifiers such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and Decision Trees (TREE) were applied on different combinations of EEG channels. Starting from two channels (C3, C4 and CP3 and CP4) positioned on the contralateral and ipsilateral sensorimotor cortex, the Region of Interest (RoI) centred on C3/Cp3 and C4/Cp4 and, finally, a data-driven automatic channels selection was tested to explore the best channel combination able to increase the classification accuracy. The results showed that the proposed automatic channels selection was able to significantly improve the performance of each classifier achieving 98% of accuracy for classification of real and imagined hand movement (sensitivity = 97%, specificity = 99%, AUC = 0.99) by SVM. While the accuracy of the classification between the imagery of hand and foot movements was 91% (sensitivity = 87%, specificity = 86%, AUC = 0.93) also with SVM. In the proposed approach, the data-driven automatic channels selection outperforms classical a priori channel selection models such as C3/C4, Cp3/Cp4, or RoIs around those channels with the utmost accuracy to help remove the boundaries of human communication and improve the quality of life of people with disabilities.

Background: Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is becoming more reliable, thanks to the advantages of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Recently, hybrid Deep Learning (hDL), which combines different DL algorithms, has gained momentum over the past five years. In this work, we proposed a review on hDL-based BCI starting from the seminal studies in 2015. Objectives: We have reviewed 47 papers that apply hDL to the BCI system published between 2015 and 2020 extracting trends and highlighting relevant aspects to the topic. Methods: We have queried four scientific search engines (Google Scholar, PubMed, IEEE Xplore and Elsevier Science Direct) and different data items were extracted from each paper such as the database used, kind of application, online/offline training, tasks used for the BCI, pre-processing methodology adopted, type of normalization used, which kind of features were extracted, type of DL architecture used, number of layers implemented and which optimization approach were used as well. All these items were then investigated one by one to uncover trends. Results: Our investigation reveals that Electroencephalography (EEG) has been the most used technique. Interestingly, despite the lower Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of the EEG data that makes pre-processing of that data mandatory, we have found that the pre-processing has only been used in 21.28% of the cases by showing that hDL seems to be able to overcome this intrinsic drawback of the EEG data. Temporal-features seem to be the most effective with 93.94% accuracy, while spatial-temporal features are the most used with 33.33% of the cases investigated. The most used architecture has been Convolutional Neural Network-Recurrent Neural Network CNN-RNN with 47% of the cases. Moreover, half of the studies have used a low number of layers to achieve a good compromise between the complexity of the network and computational efficiency. Significance: To give useful information to the scientific community, we make our summary table of hDL-based BCI papers available and invite the community to published work to contribute to it directly. We have indicated a list of open challenges, emphasizing the need to use neuroimaging techniques other than EEG, such as functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), deeper investigate the advantages and disadvantages of using pre-processing and the relationship with the accuracy obtained. To implement new combinations of architectures, such as RNN-based and Deep Belief Network DBN-based, it is necessary to better explore the frequency and temporal-frequency features of the data at hand.