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Optimising non-invasive brain-computer interface systems for free communication between naïve human participants
Free communication is one of the cornerstones of modern civilisation. While manual keyboards currently allow us to interface with computers and manifest our thoughts, a next frontier is communication without manual input. Brain-computer interface (BCI) spellers often achieve this by decoding pattern...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2019
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6904487/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31822715 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-55166-y |
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author | Renton, Angela I. Mattingley, Jason B. Painter, David R. |
author_facet | Renton, Angela I. Mattingley, Jason B. Painter, David R. |
author_sort | Renton, Angela I. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Free communication is one of the cornerstones of modern civilisation. While manual keyboards currently allow us to interface with computers and manifest our thoughts, a next frontier is communication without manual input. Brain-computer interface (BCI) spellers often achieve this by decoding patterns of neural activity as users attend to flickering keyboard displays. To date, the highest performing spellers report typing rates of ~10.00 words/minute. While impressive, these rates are typically calculated for experienced users repetitively typing single phrases. It is therefore not clear whether naïve users are able to achieve such high rates with the added cognitive load of genuine free communication, which involves continuously generating and spelling novel words and phrases. In two experiments, we developed an open-source, high-performance, non-invasive BCI speller and examined its feasibility for free communication. The BCI speller required users to focus their visual attention on a flickering keyboard display, thereby producing unique cortical activity patterns for each key, which were decoded using filter-bank canonical correlation analysis. In Experiment 1, we tested whether seventeen naïve users could maintain rapid typing during prompted free word association. We found that information transfer rates were indeed slower during this free communication task than during typing of a cued character sequence. In Experiment 2, we further evaluated the speller’s efficacy for free communication by developing a messaging interface, allowing users to engage in free conversation. The results showed that free communication was possible, but that information transfer was reduced by voluntary textual corrections and turn-taking during conversation. We evaluated a number of factors affecting the suitability of BCI spellers for free communication, and make specific recommendations for improving classification accuracy and usability. Overall, we found that developing a BCI speller for free communication requires a focus on usability over reduced character selection time, and as such, future performance appraisals should be based on genuine free communication scenarios. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6904487 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2019 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-69044872019-12-13 Optimising non-invasive brain-computer interface systems for free communication between naïve human participants Renton, Angela I. Mattingley, Jason B. Painter, David R. Sci Rep Article Free communication is one of the cornerstones of modern civilisation. While manual keyboards currently allow us to interface with computers and manifest our thoughts, a next frontier is communication without manual input. Brain-computer interface (BCI) spellers often achieve this by decoding patterns of neural activity as users attend to flickering keyboard displays. To date, the highest performing spellers report typing rates of ~10.00 words/minute. While impressive, these rates are typically calculated for experienced users repetitively typing single phrases. It is therefore not clear whether naïve users are able to achieve such high rates with the added cognitive load of genuine free communication, which involves continuously generating and spelling novel words and phrases. In two experiments, we developed an open-source, high-performance, non-invasive BCI speller and examined its feasibility for free communication. The BCI speller required users to focus their visual attention on a flickering keyboard display, thereby producing unique cortical activity patterns for each key, which were decoded using filter-bank canonical correlation analysis. In Experiment 1, we tested whether seventeen naïve users could maintain rapid typing during prompted free word association. We found that information transfer rates were indeed slower during this free communication task than during typing of a cued character sequence. In Experiment 2, we further evaluated the speller’s efficacy for free communication by developing a messaging interface, allowing users to engage in free conversation. The results showed that free communication was possible, but that information transfer was reduced by voluntary textual corrections and turn-taking during conversation. We evaluated a number of factors affecting the suitability of BCI spellers for free communication, and make specific recommendations for improving classification accuracy and usability. Overall, we found that developing a BCI speller for free communication requires a focus on usability over reduced character selection time, and as such, future performance appraisals should be based on genuine free communication scenarios. Nature Publishing Group UK 2019-12-10 /pmc/articles/PMC6904487/ /pubmed/31822715 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-55166-y Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Renton, Angela I. Mattingley, Jason B. Painter, David R. Optimising non-invasive brain-computer interface systems for free communication between naïve human participants |
title | Optimising non-invasive brain-computer interface systems for free communication between naïve human participants |
title_full | Optimising non-invasive brain-computer interface systems for free communication between naïve human participants |
title_fullStr | Optimising non-invasive brain-computer interface systems for free communication between naïve human participants |
title_full_unstemmed | Optimising non-invasive brain-computer interface systems for free communication between naïve human participants |
title_short | Optimising non-invasive brain-computer interface systems for free communication between naïve human participants |
title_sort | optimising non-invasive brain-computer interface systems for free communication between naïve human participants |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6904487/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31822715 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-55166-y |
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