Objective: Recently, electroencephalography (EEG)- based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have made tremendous progress in increasing communication speed. However, current BCI systems could only implement a small number of command codes, which hampers their applicability.
Methods: This study developed a high-speed hybrid BCI system containing as many as 108 instructions, which were encoded by concurrent P300 and steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) features and decoded by an ensemble task-related component analysis method. Notably, besides the frequency-phase-modulated SSVEP and time-modulated P300 features as contained in the traditional hybrid P300 and SSVEP features, this study found two new distinct EEG features for the concurrent P300 and SSVEP features, i.e., time-modulated SSVEP and frequency-phase- modulated P300. Ten subjects spelled in both offline and online cued-guided spelling experiments. Other ten subjects took part in online copy-spelling experiments.
Results: Offline analyses demonstrate that the concurrent P300 and SSVEP features can provide adequate classification information to correctly select the target from 108 characters in 1.7 seconds. Online cued-guided spelling and copy-spelling tests further show that the proposed BCI system can reach an average information transfer rate (ITR) of 172.46 ± 32.91 bits/min and 164.69 ± 33.32 bits/min respectively, with a peak value of 238.41 bits/min (The demo video of online copy-spelling can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EW2Q08oHSBo).
Conclusion: We expand a BCI instruction set to over 100 command codes with high-speed in an efficient manner, which significantly improves the degree of freedom of BCIs.
Significance: This study hold promise for broadening the applications of BCI systems.