Abstract
This paper presents the novel approach to evaluate the effects of different motor activation tasks of functional near infrared spectroscopy signal (fNIRS). Functional near infrared spectroscopy is a practical non-invasive optical technique to detect characteristic of hemodynamic response during functional activation of the cerebral cortex. In this paper, fNIRS measurements were made in the area of motor cortex. Three subjects, aged 23–30 years, participated in the experiment. The application of the Lyapunov analysis which is a method of nonlinear analysis to analyze and to quantify the chaotic property in the time series of the hemoglobin dynamics of the various motor imagery tasks of fNIRS signal was presented. The strength of chaos was estimated by the Kolmogorov entropy which is related to Lyapunov spectrum. Experimental results show that these nonlinear measures are good discriminators of NIRS signals. The Lyapunov spectra, Lyapunov dimension (DL), and Kolmogorov entropy (K) all indicated chaotic behavior.
