I'm implementing a BCI-Wheel Chair Control System where signal are extracted from the arm into MATLAB -> feature extraction -> classification -> Control signal
The delay should be minimal between muscle movement and when control signal is sent
I've read that windows is not optimal for this purpose (not even 8.1?) Can anyone suggest any solutions to speed up the process as I've described from a OS/hardware perspective?
Your choices are Windows (various flavors,) Mac OSX, and Linux (even more flavors.) Those are the operating systems that Matlab runs on.
blackibiza's comments about ARM aren't relevant here, because Matlab only runs on Intel or AMD x86 processors.
Of the three, linux is more customizable. You can strip a linux system down so that there's less stuff going on in the background, and you can use the realtime patches to improve things more.
Since you are using Matlab directly, I would assume you are still protoyping your system. At that stage, I would think you would work with whatever you are most comfortable with so long as it doesn't cause an obvious unacceptable performance problem.
If you are trying to move beyond the prototype stage, then I think you should look at the MathWorks Embedded Coder pages. This offers support for converting Matlab code into C code that you can compile and run on various embedded systems - including ARM.
Linux and Real-Time Linux patch are the answer. Especially if you are dealing with ARM boards, it gives you the minimum overhead possible, using an headless or terminal-only system. Quoting the an article ( http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/200-libby-clark/710319-intro-to-real-time-linux-for-embedded-developers) featured on linux.com,
if your embedded device has some "must have" deadlines to respond to then the PREEMPT_RT patch would probably be sufficient. I've heard that some of the Garmin navigational devices run with Linux patched with the PREEMPT_RT kernel.
What PREEMPT_RT gives you over the normal kernel is not only faster response times, but more importantly, it removes all unbounded latencies. An unbounded latency is where the amount of delay that can occur is dependent on the situation
You can get more infos about Real Time patch and RTLinux (Real Time Linux with the applied patch) here:
