Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology, University of Tübingen, Gartenstr. 29, 72074 Tübingen, Germany.
Clin Neurophysiol. 2010 Apr;121(4):516-23. doi: 10.1016/j.clinph.2009.11.087. Epub 2010 Jan 22.
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) provide non-muscular communication for individuals diagnosed with late-stage motoneuron disease (e.g., amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)). In the final stages of the disease, a BCI cannot rely on the visual modality. This study examined a method to achieve high accuracies using auditory stimuli only.
We propose an auditory BCI based on a three-stimulus paradigm. This paradigm is similar to the standard oddball but includes an additional target (i.e. two target stimuli, one frequent stimulus). Three versions of the task were evaluated in which the target stimuli differed in loudness, pitch or direction.
Twenty healthy participants achieved an average information transfer rate (ITR) of up to 2.46 bits/min and accuracies of 78.5%. Most subjects (14 of 20) achieved their best performance with targets differing in pitch.
With this study, the viability of the paradigm was shown for healthy participants and will next be evaluated with individuals diagnosed with ALS or locked-in syndrome (LIS) after stroke.
The here presented BCI offers communication with binary choices (yes/no) independent of vision. As it requires only little time per selection, it may constitute a reliable means of communication for patients who lost all motor function and have a short attention span.
脑机接口（BCI）为被诊断患有晚期运动神经元疾病（例如肌萎缩性侧索硬化症（ALS））的个体提供非肌肉交流方式。在疾病的最后阶段，BCI 不能依赖视觉模式。本研究检验了仅使用听觉刺激实现高精度的方法。
我们提出了一种基于三刺激范式的听觉 BCI。该范式类似于标准的oddball 范式，但包含了一个额外的目标（即两个目标刺激，一个频繁刺激）。评估了三个版本的任务，其中目标刺激在响度、音调和方向上有所不同。
20 名健康参与者的平均信息传输率（ITR）高达 2.46 位/分钟，准确率为 78.5%。大多数受试者（20 名中的 14 名）在目标刺激音高不同时表现出最佳性能。
通过这项研究，该范式在健康参与者中表现出了可行性，接下来将在中风后被诊断患有 ALS 或闭锁综合征（LIS）的个体中进行评估。
本文提出的 BCI 提供了独立于视觉的二进制选择（是/否）的交流方式。由于每次选择只需要很少的时间，因此对于失去所有运动功能且注意力持续时间较短的患者来说，它可能是一种可靠的交流方式。
