Performance of a tactile P300 speller for healthy people and severely disabled patients

P300 based Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) for communication are well known since many years. Most of them use visual stimuli to elicit evoked potentials because it is easy to integrate a high number of different classes into the paradigm. Nevertheless, a BCI that depends on visual stimuli is sometimes not feasible due to the presence of visual impairment in patients with severe brain injuries. In this case, it could be possible to use auditory or somatosensory stimulation. In this publication a vibrotactile P300 based BCI is introduced. Two different approaches were tested: a first approach using two stimulators and a second one that utilizes three stimulators for emitting the stimuli. The two paradigms were tested on 16 users: A group of ten healthy users and a second group comprising of 6 patients suffering Locked-In Syndrome. The control accuracy was calculated for both groups and both approaches, proving the feasibility of the device, not only for healthy people but also in severely disabled patients. In a second step we evaluated the influence of the number of stimuli on the accuracy. It was shown that in many cases the maximum accuracy was already reached with a small number of stimuli, this could be used in future tests to speed up the Information transfer rate.