A low-cost auditory multi-class brain-computer interface based on pitch, spatial and timbre cues
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Computational Science, Human-Computer Interaction
- Keywords
- EEG, Brain-Computer Interface, P300, Auditory Evoked Potentials, Auditory Speller
- Copyright
- © 2013 Vamvakousis et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
- Cite this article
- 2013. A low-cost auditory multi-class brain-computer interface based on pitch, spatial and timbre cues. PeerJ PrePrints 1:e179v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.179v1
Abstract
P300-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are especially useful for people with illnesses, which prevent them from communicating in a normal way (e.g. brain or spinal cord injury). However, most of the existing P300-based BCI systems use visual stimulation which may not be suitable for patients with sight deterioration (e.g. patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Moreover, P300-based BCI systems rely on expensive equipment, which greatly limits their use outside the clinical environment. Therefore, we propose a multi-class BCI system based solely on auditory stimuli, which makes use of low-cost EEG technology. We explored different combinations of timbre, pitch and spatial auditory stimuli (TimPiSp: timbre-pitch-spatial, TimSp: timbre-spatial, and Timb: timbre-only) and three inter-stimulus intervals (150ms, 175ms and 300ms), and evaluated our system by conducting an oddball task on 7 healthy subjects. This is the first study in which these 3 auditory cues are compared. After averaging several repetitions in the 175ms inter-stimulus interval, we obtained average selection accuracies of 97.14%, 91.43%, and 88.57% for modalities TimPiSp, TimSp, and Timb, respectively. Best subject’s accuracy was 100% in all modalities and inter-stimulus intervals. Average information transfer rate for the 150ms inter-stimulus interval in the TimPiSp modality was 14.85 bits/min. Best subject’s information transfer rate was 39.96 bits/min for 175ms Timbre condition. Based on the TimPiSp modality, an auditory P300 speller was implemented and evaluated by asking users to type a 12-characters-long phrase. Six out of 7 users completed the task. The average spelling speed was 0.56 chars/min and best subject’s performance was 0.84 chars/min. The obtained results show that the proposed auditory BCI is successful with healthy subjects and may constitute the basis for future implementations of more practical and affordable auditory P300-based BCI systems.