A New Auditory Multi-Class Brain-Computer Interface Paradigm: Spatial Hearing as an Informative Cue

By Martijn Schreuder, Benjamin Blankertz, Michael W. Tangermann. PLoS ONE, 2010

313 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Most P300-based brain-computer interface (BCI) approaches use the visual modality for stimulation. For use with patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) this might not be the preferable choice because of sight deterioration. Moreover, using a modality different from the visual one minimizes interference with possible visual feedback. Therefore, a multi-class BCI paradigm is proposed that uses spatially distributed, auditory cues. Ten healthy subjects participated in an offline oddball task with the spatial location of the stimuli being a discriminating cue. Experiments were done in free field, with an individual speaker for each location. Different inter-stimulus intervals of 1000 ms, 300 ms and 175 ms were tested. With averaging over multiple repetitions, selection scores went over 90% for most conditions, i.e., in over 90% of the trials the correct location was selected. One subject reached a 100% correct score. Corresponding information transfer rates were high, up to an average score of 17.39 bits/minute for the 175 ms condition (best subject 25.20 bits/minute). When presenting the stimuli through a single speaker, thus effectively canceling the spatial properties of the cue, selection scores went down below 70% for most subjects. We conclude that the proposed spatial auditory paradigm is successful for healthy subjects and shows promising results that may lead to a fast BCI that solely relies on the auditory sense.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd63829d3cdcd16faa28f5a44a9a05de58727a4a

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

The Berlin Brain–Computer Interface: Non-Medical Uses of BCI Technology (2010, background): “…et al., 2005; Citi et al., 2008; McFarland et al., 2008; Hwang et al., 2009; Williamson et al., 2009; Höhne et al., 2010; Schaefer et al., 2010; Schreuder et al., 2010; Treder and Blankertz, 2010) and data analysis technology (Parra et al., 2005, 2008; Dornhege et al., 2007b; Lotte et al.,…”
Brain-computer interfacing using modulations of alpha activity induced by covert shifts of attention (2011, background): “For instance, one may fall back on other sensory modalities such as spatial auditory [4,5] and tactile feedback [6].”
(C)overt attention and visual speller design in an ERP-based brain-computer interface (2010, background): “A number of variations of the original speller have been developed, and it has also been adapted to non-visual modalities by using auditory [2-6] and tactile [7] stimulation.”
Progress in Brain Computer Interface: Challenges and Opportunities (2019, background): “Event related potential [63], steady-state visual evoked potential [64], auditory evoked potential [65] and steady-state somatosensory evoked potentials [66], are target specific and motor imagery [14] is a slow wave and, thus they not suitable for virtual reality and gaming applications [67].”