Built a live EEG-controlled robotic painting arm for someone with EDS and demoed it at a conference last weekend. Some notes + looking for BCI folks in SG
Last weekend I helped demo a BCI system live on stage at AI Engineer Singapore. A woman with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome controlled a robotic painting arm using her brain activity in front of a packed room, first attempt, no safety net.
Here's the setup we used:
- Muse 2 for the headgear
- Head IMU for XY brush movement to elect the different paint
- Jaw clench to for drawing or brush selection
- Blink patterns for color selection
- Focus states to switch between draw and paint modes
- [Not used] Motor imagery to move the arms
Nothing exotic. The whole point was that the mapping had to be robust enough that she could perform it under pressure without thinking too hard about the interface...which is the actual hard problem with consumer-grade EEG.
That said, the demo worked. She painted and the crowd lost it a bit. I was trying my best not to pee my pants (I'm the guy monitoring the situation on the left)
Some honest takeaways:
- The Muse 2 frontal montage is genuinely limiting for anything motor-imagery based. You're not getting clean mu rhythm data from Fp1/Fp2. What saved us was leaning into IMU + artifact-based signals (jaw, blink) rather than fighting for MI classification on unsuitable electrodes. The MI model was 60+% at best, which was slightly better than chance. Sometimes the best approach is to just "use the signal you actually have."
- Calibration across sessions is still brutal. We burned a lot of time on this. Per-subject drift is real and the live performance context makes it worse and stress changes baseline physiology more than people account for in lab settings.
What's next?
Longer term I'm building neural decoders for intent via imagined speech / directional commands. However, the data problem is the bottleneck.
I'm based in Singapore and actively looking to connect with other BCI folks here, especially if you have kits sitting around (EEG caps, higher-channel systems, anything ADS1299-based) that you'd be open to collaborating on data collection with. I've developed good decoders using open source datasets from both Emotiv Epoc and OpenBCI. I'm really too broke to afford the units to test the decoders.
Not looking to borrow and ghost. I am happy to share data, co-author, or just geek out. Singapore's BCI community feels small and I'd rather it weren't.
DM me or drop a comment if you're around! My next thing is Super AI in a couple of weeks.