Common spatial patterns for steady-state somatosensory evoked potentials

Abstract

Steady-state somatosensory evoked potential (SSSEP) is a recently developing brain-computer interface (BCI) paradigm where the brain response to tactile stimulation of a specific frequency is used. Thus far, spatial information was not examined in depth in SSSEP BCI, because frequency information was regarded as the main concern of SSSEP analysis. However, given that the somatosensory cortex areas, each of which correspond to a different body part, are well clustered, we can assume that the spatial information could be beneficial for SSSEP analysis. Based on this assumption, we apply the common spatial pattern (CSP) method, which is the spatial feature extraction method most widely used for the motor imagery BCI paradigm, to SSSEP BCI. Experimental results show that our approach, where two CSP methods are applied to the signal of each frequency band, has a performance improvement from 70% to 75%.