TY  - JOUR
A1  - Simon, Nadine
A1  - Käthner, Ivo
A1  - Ruf, Carolin A.
A1  - Pasqualotto, Emanuele
A1  - Kübler, Andrea
A1  - Halder, Sebastian
T1  - An auditory multiclass brain-computer interface with natural stimuli: Usability evaluation with healthy participants and a motor impaired end user
JF  - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
N2  - Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) can serve as muscle independent communication aids. Persons, who are unable to control their eye muscles (e.g., in the completely locked-in state) or have severe visual impairments for other reasons, need BCI systems that do not rely on the visual modality. For this reason, BCIs that employ auditory stimuli were suggested. In this study, a multiclass BCI spelling system was implemented that uses animal voices with directional cues to code rows and columns of a letter matrix. To reveal possible training effects with the system, 11 healthy participants performed spelling tasks on 2 consecutive days. In a second step, the system was tested by a participant with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in two sessions. In the first session, healthy participants spelled with an average accuracy of 76% (3.29 bits/min) that increased to 90% (4.23 bits/min) on the second day. Spelling accuracy by the participant with ALS was 20% in the first and 47% in the second session. The results indicate a strong training effect for both the healthy participants and the participant with ALS. While healthy participants reached high accuracies in the first session and second session, accuracies for the participant with ALS were not sufficient for satisfactory communication in both sessions. More training sessions might be needed to improve spelling accuracies. The study demonstrated the feasibility of the auditory BCI with healthy users and stresses the importance of training with auditory multiclass BCIs, especially for potential end-users of BCI with disease.
KW  - P300
KW  - EEG
KW  - auditory BCI
KW  - brain-computer interface
KW  - communication
KW  - ALS
Y1  - 2015
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-126450
VL  - 8
IS  - 1039
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kleih, Sonja C.
A1  - Herweg, Andreas
A1  - Kaufmann, Tobias
A1  - Staiger-Sälzer, Pit
A1  - Gerstner, Natascha
A1  - Kübler, Andrea
T1  - The WIN-speller: a new intuitive auditory brain-computer interface spelling application
JF  - Frontiers in Neuroscience
N2  - The objective of this study was to test the usability of a new auditory Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) application for communication. We introduce a word based, intuitive auditory spelling paradigm the WIN-speller. In the WIN-speller letters are grouped by words, such as the word KLANG representing the letters A, G, K, L, and N. Thereby, the decoding step between perceiving a code and translating it to the stimuli it represents becomes superfluous. We tested 11 healthy volunteers and four end-users with motor impairment in the copy spelling mode. Spelling was successful with an average accuracy of 84% in the healthy sample. Three of the end-users communicated with average accuracies of 80% or higher while one user was not able to communicate reliably. Even though further evaluation is required, the WIN-speller represents a potential alternative for BCI based communication in end-users.
KW  - Brain-Computer Interface (BCI)
KW  - communication
KW  - P300
KW  - motor-impaired end-user
KW  - auditory
Y1  - 2015
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-125972
VL  - 9
ER  -