ASSR/P300-Hybrid auditory brain-computer interface for improved performance

Abstract

Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) is a technology that provides a new communication way by translating brain activity in to digital command. Due to the incapability of using the visual-stimuli based BCI for patients in completely lock-in state (CLS) or users who has eye problem, auditory stimuli have been used to substitute the conventional visual stimuli. This paper proposed an auditory hybrid BCI that utilize and combine both auditory steady state response (ASSR) and spatial-auditory P300 BCI to improve the performance for the auditory BCI system. The proposed ASSR/P300-hybrid auditory BCI system achieves 85.33% accuracy with 9.11 bits/min information transfer rate (ITR) outperforming the spatial-auditory P300 BCI system that achieves 74.58% accuracy with 4.18 bits/min ITR and ASSR system that achieves 66.68% accuracy with 2.01 bits/min ITR in the single-trial. This shows that the proposed hybrid system is a feasible and promising system that could be used to improve the overall performance for auditory based BCI.