Asynchronous BCI control of a robot simulator with supervised online training

Abstract

Due to the non-stationarity of EEG signals, online training and adaptation is essential to EEG based brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. Asynchronous BCI offers more natural human-machine interaction, but it is a great challenge to train and adapt an asynchronous BCI online because the user's control intention and timing are usually unknown. This paper proposes a novel motor imagery based asynchronous BCI for controlling a simulated robot in a specifically designed environment which is able to provide user's control intention and timing during online experiments, so that online training and adaptation of motor imagery based asynchronous BCI can be effectively investigated. This paper also proposes an online training method, attempting to automate the process of finding the optimal parameter values of the BCI system to deal with non-stationary EEG signals. Experimental results have shown that the proposed method for online training of asynchronous BCI significantly improves the performance. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.