‘Write’ but not ‘spell’ Chinese characters with a BCI controlled robot*

Visual brain-computer interface (BCI) systems have made tremendous process in recent years. It has been demonstrated to perform well in spelling words. However, different from spelling English words in one-dimension sequences, Chinese characters are often written in a two-dimensional structure. Previous studies had never investigated how to use BCI to ‘write’ but not ‘spell’ Chinese characters. This study developed an innovative BCI-controlled robot for writing Chinese characters. The BCI system contained 108 commands displayed in a 9*12 array. A pixel-based writing method was proposed to map the starting point and ending point of each stroke of Chinese characters to the array. Connecting the starting and ending points for each stroke can make up any Chinese character. The large command set was encoded by the hybrid P300 and SSVEP features efficiently, in which each output needed only 1s of …