Developing a Novel Tactile P300 Brain-Computer Interface With a Cheeks-Stim Paradigm

Objective: Tactile brain-computer interface (BCI) systems can provide new communication and control options for patients with impairments of eye movements or vision. One of the most common modalities used in these BCIs is the P300 potential. Until now, tactile P300 BCIs have been successfully constructed by situating tactile stimuli at various parts of the human body. This article proposed a novel tactile P300 BCI paradigm for further expanding the tactile stimulation methods. Methods: In our proposed paradigm, the spatial target vibrotactile stimuli were delivered to subject's left and right cheeks. To validate the feasibility of our proposed paradigm, a traditional tactile P300 BCI paradigm employing spatial target vibrotactile stimuli to subject's left and right wrists was used for comparison. Results: The experimental results of nine healthy subjects demonstrated that the proposed paradigm could obtain significantly higher classification accuracy and information transfer rate than the traditional paradigm (both for p <; 0.05). Furthermore, the subjective feedback showed that our proposed paradigm was more favored by the subjects compared to the traditional paradigm, and most subjects reported that the new paradigm helped them easily distinguish between targets and non-targets. Conclusion: The proposed tactile P300 BCI paradigm is feasible, and can bring about superior performance and use-evaluation. Significance: The new paradigm might lead to many promising applications of such BCIs.