National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies, Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health, PO Box 22002, Albany, NY 12201, United States of America. Department of Neurology, Stratton VA Medical Center, 113 Holland Ave, Albany, NY 12208, United States of America. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois, 306 N Wright St, Urbana, IL 61801, United States of America.
J Neural Eng. 2018 Oct;15(5):056012. doi: 10.1088/1741-2552/aacfdd. Epub 2018 Jun 28.
In this paper, we report the performance of 9-11-year-old children using a steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) and provide control data collected from adults for comparison. Children in our study achieved a much higher performance (79% accuracy; average age 9.64 years old) than the only previous investigation of children using an SSVEP-based BCI (∼50% accuracy; average age 9.86 years old).
Experiments were conducted in two phases, a short calibration phase and a longer experimental phase. An offline analysis of the data collected during the calibration phase was used to set two parameters for a classifier and to screen participants who did not achieve a minimum accuracy of 85%.
Eleven of the 14 children and all 11 of the adults who completed the calibration phase met the minimum accuracy requirement. During the experimental phase, children selected targets with a similar accuracy (79% for children versus 78% for adults), latency (2.1 s for children versus 1.9 s for adults), and bitrate (0.50 bits s for children and 0.56 bits s for adults) as adults.
This study shows that children can use an SSVEP-based BCI with higher performance than previously believed and is the first to report the performance of children using an SSVEP-based BCI in terms of latency and bitrate. The results of this study imply that children with severe motor disabilities (such as locked-in syndrome) may use an SSVEP-based BCI to restore/replace the ability to communicate.
本研究报告了使用稳态视觉诱发电位（SSVEP）脑-机接口（BCI）的 9-11 岁儿童的表现，并提供了成人的对照数据。与之前仅对使用 SSVEP-BCI 的儿童进行的研究（约 50%的准确率；平均年龄 9.86 岁）相比，我们研究中的儿童表现出更高的性能（准确率 79%；平均年龄 9.64 岁）。
实验分为两个阶段进行，一个是短期校准阶段，另一个是较长的实验阶段。通过对校准阶段收集的数据进行离线分析，为分类器设置了两个参数，并筛选出准确率未达到 85%的参与者。
在完成校准阶段的 14 名儿童中有 11 名，以及所有 11 名成人都达到了最低准确率要求。在实验阶段，儿童的目标选择准确率与成人相似（儿童为 79%，成人为 78%），潜伏期（儿童为 2.1 秒，成人为 1.9 秒）和比特率（儿童为 0.50 比特/秒，成人为 0.56 比特/秒）也相似。
这项研究表明，儿童可以使用 SSVEP-BCI 获得比之前认为的更高的性能，并且是第一个报告使用 SSVEP-BCI 的儿童在潜伏期和比特率方面的表现的研究。这项研究的结果表明，患有严重运动障碍（如闭锁综合征）的儿童可能会使用 SSVEP-BCI 来恢复/替代交流能力。
