Communications of the ACM
Researchers Develop a Fast, Noninvasive Brain-Computer Interface
Researchers from Tsinghua University and the University of California, San Diego, have developed a non-invasive brain-computer interface with the fastest information transfer rate ever achieved.
Credit: PNAS 2015
Researchers from Beijing's Tsinghua University and the University of California, San Diego, say they have developed a non-invasive brain-computer interface that offers the fastest information transfer rate (ITR) ever achieved.
A popular application for the technology is speller systems for people who cannot communicate, and the ITR is as slow as five letters per minute in some systems. The researchers propose a new joint frequency-phase modulation method to tag 40 characters with 0.5-second-long flickering signals, and they have develop a user-specific target identification algorithm using individual calibration data.
The speller achieved high ITRs in online spelling tasks.
The team's system is based on steady-state visual evoked potentials, which detect the user's gaze direction to a target character. The researchers improved the system's performance by using a synchronous modulation and demodulation paradigm and adopting a user-specific decoding algorithm, which adjusts to individual differences in visual latency. They also implemented a new visual latency estimation approach to compensate for measuring issues caused by interference from noisy electroencephalogram signals.
During tests, the mean spelling rate was about 50 to 60 characters per minute, with an ITR of about 4.5 to 5.5 bits per second.
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Abstracts Copyright © 2015 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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