Brain-Computer Interface: Generic Control Interface for Social Interaction Applications

After suffering a more severe disease like spinal cord injury or stroke patients are often not able to interact or even communicate with their environment anymore, especially at the beginning of rehabilitation. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) can substitute this temporarily lost communication channels and might support rehabilitation by providing an alternative way for controlling a computer only by thoughts without any muscle activity. This enables the patient to communicate by writing letters on the screen, to stay socially in contact with friends or people outside the rehabilitation facility by participating in games like Second Life where they may appear as healthy persons. Another application is to control items in their room connected to the BCI system like the lights which can be turned off and on as it can be done in a virtual smart home without leaving the bed. In this paper a generic BCI interface is described which allows to control the aforementioned applications concurrently and transparently switch among them utilizing the P300 approach. The results of a recent study show that such a BCI can be used by patients suffering from cervical spinal cord injury almost as well as by healthy people which encourages us to think it may assist rehabilitation regarding the social aspect.