Low-Latency Neural Inference on an Edge Device for Real-Time Handwriting Recognition from EEG Signals

TL;DR

This paper presents a machine learning approach that enables real-time, high-accuracy handwriting recognition from EEG signals on portable edge devices, advancing non-invasive brain-computer interfaces for communication.

Contribution

It introduces EEdGeNet, a hybrid neural network architecture optimized for low-latency EEG decoding on edge hardware, with effective feature selection reducing latency significantly.

Findings

Achieved 89.83% accuracy in real-time EEG handwriting decoding.

Reduced latency to 202.6 ms with minimal accuracy loss using feature selection.

Demonstrated feasibility of portable, non-invasive BCI for communication.

Abstract

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer a pathway to restore communication for individuals with severe motor or speech impairments. Imagined handwriting provides an intuitive paradigm for character-level neural decoding, bridging the gap between human intention and digital communication. While invasive approaches such as electrocorticography (ECoG) achieve high accuracy, their surgical risks limit widespread adoption. Non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) offers safer and more scalable alternatives but suffers from low signal-to-noise ratio and spatial resolution, constraining its decoding precision. This work demonstrates that advanced machine learning combined with informative EEG feature extraction can overcome these barriers, enabling real-time, high-accuracy neural decoding on portable edge devices. A 32-channel EEG dataset was collected from fifteen participants performing imagined handwriting. Signals were preprocessed with bandpass filtering and artifact subspace reconstruction, followed by extraction of 85 time-, frequency-, and graphical-domain features. A hybrid architecture, EEdGeNet, integrates a Temporal Convolutional Network with a multilayer perceptron trained on the extracted features. When deployed on an NVIDIA Jetson TX2, the system achieved 89.83 percent accuracy with 914.18 ms per-character latency. Selecting only ten key features reduced latency by 4.5 times to 202.6 ms with less than 1 percent loss in accuracy. These results establish a pathway for accurate, low-latency, and fully portable non-invasive BCIs supporting real-time communication.