McCrimmon Colin M, Fu Jonathan Lee, Wang Ming, Lopes Lucas Silva, Wang Po T, Karimi-Bidhendi Alireza, Liu Charles Y, Heydari Payam, Nenadic Zoran, Do An Hong
IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2017 Oct;64(10):2313-2320. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2017.2667579. Epub 2017 Feb 13.
Conventional brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are often expensive, complex to operate, and lack portability, which confines their use to laboratory settings. Portable, inexpensive BCIs can mitigate these problems, but it remains unclear whether their low-cost design compromises their performance. Therefore, we developed a portable, low-cost BCI and compared its performance to that of a conventional BCI.
The BCI was assembled by integrating a custom electroencephalogram (EEG) amplifier with an open-source microcontroller and a touchscreen. The function of the amplifier was first validated against a commercial bioamplifier, followed by a head-to-head comparison between the custom BCI (using four EEG channels) and a conventional 32-channel BCI. Specifically, five able-bodied subjects were cued to alternate between hand opening/closing and remaining motionless while the BCI decoded their movement state in real time and provided visual feedback through a light emitting diode. Subjects repeated the above task for a total of 10 trials, and were unaware of which system was being used. The performance in each trial was defined as the temporal correlation between the cues and the decoded states.
The EEG data simultaneously acquired with the custom and commercial amplifiers were visually similar and highly correlated ( ρ = 0.79). The decoding performances of the custom and conventional BCIs averaged across trials and subjects were 0.70 ± 0.12 and 0.68 ± 0.10, respectively, and were not significantly different.
The performance of our portable, low-cost BCI is comparable to that of the conventional BCIs.
Platforms, such as the one developed here, are suitable for BCI applications outside of a laboratory.
传统的脑机接口（BCI）通常价格昂贵、操作复杂且缺乏便携性，这使其仅局限于实验室环境使用。便携式、低成本的BCI可以缓解这些问题，但尚不清楚其低成本设计是否会影响其性能。因此，我们开发了一种便携式、低成本的BCI，并将其性能与传统BCI进行比较。
该BCI通过将定制的脑电图（EEG）放大器与开源微控制器和触摸屏集成而组装而成。首先将该放大器的功能与商用生物放大器进行验证，然后将定制BCI（使用四个EEG通道）与传统的32通道BCI进行直接比较。具体而言，提示五名身体健全的受试者在手部张开/闭合和保持静止之间交替，同时BCI实时解码他们的运动状态并通过发光二极管提供视觉反馈。受试者总共重复上述任务10次，并且不知道使用的是哪个系统。每次试验的性能定义为提示与解码状态之间的时间相关性。
用定制放大器和商用放大器同时采集的EEG数据在视觉上相似且高度相关（ρ = 0.79）。跨试验和受试者平均的定制BCI和传统BCI的解码性能分别为0.70±0.12和0.68±0.10，且无显著差异。
我们的便携式、低成本BCI的性能与传统BCI相当。
此处开发的此类平台适用于实验室之外的BCI应用。
