Departamento de Tecnología Electrónica, Universidad de Málaga, 29071 Málaga, Spain.
Sensors (Basel). 2021 May 26;21(11):3716. doi: 10.3390/s21113716.
Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are a type of assistive technology that uses the brain signals of users to establish a communication and control channel between them and an external device. BCI systems may be a suitable tool to restore communication skills in severely motor-disabled patients, as BCI do not rely on muscular control. The loss of communication is one of the most negative consequences reported by such patients. This paper presents a BCI system focused on the control of four mainstream messaging applications running in a smartphone: WhatsApp, Telegram, e-mail and short message service (SMS). The control of the BCI is achieved through the well-known visual P300 row-column paradigm (RCP), allowing the user to select control commands as well as spelling characters. For the control of the smartphone, the system sends synthesized voice commands that are interpreted by a virtual assistant running in the smartphone. Four tasks related to the four mentioned messaging services were tested with 15 healthy volunteers, most of whom were able to accomplish the tasks, which included sending free text e-mails to an address proposed by the subjects themselves. The online performance results obtained, as well as the results of subjective questionnaires, support the viability of the proposed system.
脑机接口（BCI）是一种辅助技术，它利用用户的脑信号在他们和外部设备之间建立一个通信和控制通道。BCI 系统可能是一种恢复严重运动障碍患者的交流技能的合适工具，因为 BCI 不依赖于肌肉控制。丧失交流能力是这些患者报告的最负面后果之一。本文提出了一个专注于控制智能手机中运行的四个主流消息应用程序的 BCI 系统：WhatsApp、Telegram、电子邮件和短信服务（SMS）。BCI 的控制是通过著名的视觉 P300 行-列范式（RCP）实现的，允许用户选择控制命令和拼写字符。对于智能手机的控制，系统会发送合成语音命令，由智能手机中运行的虚拟助手进行解释。该系统用 15 名健康志愿者测试了与上述四个消息服务相关的四个任务，其中大多数志愿者都能够完成任务，包括向用户自己提出的地址发送免费的电子邮件。所获得的在线性能结果以及主观问卷的结果支持了所提出的系统的可行性。
