Toward domotic appliances control through a self-paced P300-based BCI

During recent years there has been a growing interest in Brain Computer Interface (BCI) systems as an alternative means of interaction with the external world for people with severe motor disabilities. The use of the P300 event-related potentials as control feature allows users to choose between various options (letters or icons) requiring a very short calibration phase. The aim of this work is to improve performances and flexibility of P300 based BCIs. An efficient BCI system should be able to understand user's intentions from the ongoing EEG, abstaining from doing a selection when the user is engaged in a different activity, and changing its speed of selection depending on current user's attention level. Our self-paced system addresses all these issues representing an important step beyond the classical synchronous P300 BCI that forces the user in a continuous control task. Experimentation has been performed on 10 healthy volunteers acting on a BCI-controlled domestic environment in order to demonstrate the potential usability of BCI systems in everyday life. Results show that the self-paced BCI increases information transfer rate with respect to the synchronous one, being very robust, at the same time, in avoiding false negatives when the user is not engaged in a control task.