Analysis of steady state visual evoked potentials based on viewing distance changes for brain-machine interface speller

Abstract

Recently, steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based brain-machine interface (BMI) speller systems have shown a great performance increase with high information transfer rate (ITR) and short response time. In previous BMI speller systems, however, users should utilize the systems at fixed viewing distance environment for evoking SSVEP signals because a variation of the SSVEP signals according to changes of viewing distance was not considered during system design process. For a real-world application of BMI speller, reliable speller systems which are robust to various viewing distance environment are needed. In this study, hence, we investigate the effects of viewing distance on SSVEP by changing distance between a user and visual stimuli. Here, we used four visual stimuli which have different frequencies using LED monitor. In the subsequent analysis, we present classification results with several methods. Our analysis and results show a possibility that SSVEP under various viewing distance environment could be facilitated.