Effects of Skin Friction on Tactile P300 Brain-Computer Interface Performance.

Ying Mao,Shurui Li,Andrzej Cichocki,Yangyang Miao,Jing Jin

doi:10.1155/2021/6694310

Abstract

Tactile perception, the primary sensing channel of the tactile brain-computer interface (BCI), is a complicated process. Skin friction plays a vital role in tactile perception. This study aimed to examine the effects of skin friction on tactile P300 BCI performance. Two kinds of oddball paradigms were designed, silk-stim paradigm (SSP) and linen-stim paradigm (LSP), in which silk and linen were wrapped on target vibration motors, respectively. In both paradigms, the disturbance vibrators were wrapped in cotton. The experimental results showed that LSP could induce stronger event-related potentials (ERPs) and achieved a higher classification accuracy and information transfer rate (ITR) compared with SSP. The findings indicate that high skin friction can achieve high performance in tactile BCI. This work provides a novel research direction and constitutes a viable basis for the future tactile P300 BCI, which may benefit patients with visual impairments.

Highlights

Brain-computer interface (BCI) is a new communication and control technique that establishes the interaction between the human brain and external devices without the involvement of normal neural pathways. us far, BCI has shown great application values in medical rehabilitation (such as stroke patients [1] and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) [2]), auxiliary control, and life entertainment. e commonly used brain activity patterns in current BCI systems include motor imagery (MI) [8,9,10,11], steadystate visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) [12, 13], and eventrelated potentials (ERPs) [14, 15]
Visual and auditory BCIs are inapplicable to patients with vision or hearing impairments. erefore, studies should focus on the development of tactile-based BCI for patients with vision and hearing impairments. e first tactile-based BCI system was introduced by Brouwer and Van Erp [20]
To observe the discrimination between the target and nontarget in the two paradigms, we adopted r-squared values to quantify the differences between targets and nontargets. e data segment from 100 ms before the stimulus onset to 800 ms after was extracted, and the target and nontarget ERPs were separated as the input of the following calculation to obtain the r-squared values:

Summary

Introduction

P300 potential, a commonly used component in ERP, is usually related to psychological and cognitive functions and is generally induced by the oddball paradigm, in which the occurrence of the target stimulus is a small-probability event [16]. It appears within 250–500 ms after the stimulus occurs and has an evident positive amplitude [17]. Visual and auditory BCIs are inapplicable to patients with vision or hearing impairments. Erefore, studies should focus on the development of tactile-based BCI for patients with vision and hearing impairments. Visual and auditory BCIs are inapplicable to patients with vision or hearing impairments. erefore, studies should focus on the development of tactile-based BCI for patients with vision and hearing impairments. e first tactile-based BCI system was introduced by Brouwer and Van Erp [20]

Methods

Results

Conclusion