Dynamic time window mechanism for time synchronous VEP-based BCIs—Performance evaluation with a dictionary-supported BCI speller employing SSVEP and c-VEP

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) based on visual evoked potentials (VEPs) allow high communication speeds and accuracies. The fastest speeds can be achieved if targets are identified in a synchronous way (i.e., after a pre-set time period the system will produce a command output). The duration a target needs to be fixated on until the system classifies an output command affects the overall system performance. Hence, extracting a data window dedicated for the classification is of critical importance for VEP-based BCIs. Secondly, unintentional fixation on a target could easily lead to its selection. For the practical usability of BCI applications it is desirable to distinguish between intentional and unintentional fixations. This can be achieved by using threshold-based target identification methods. The study explores personalized dynamic classification time windows for threshold-based time synchronous VEP BCIs. The proposed techniques were tested employing the SSVEP and the c-VEP paradigm. Spelling performance was evaluated using an 8-target dictionary-supported BCI utilizing an n-gram word prediction model. The performance of twelve healthy participants was assessed with the information transfer rate (ITR) and accuracy. All participants completed sentence spelling tasks, reaching average accuracies of 94% and 96.3% for the c-VEP and the SSVEP paradigm, respectively. Average ITRs around 57 bpm were achieved for both paradigms.