Combining Eye Gaze Input With a Brain-Computer Interface for Touchless Human-Computer Interaction

A Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) provides a new communication channel for severely disabled people who have completely or partially lost control over muscular activity. It is questionable whether a BCI is the best choice for controlling a device if partial muscular activity still is available. For example, gaze-based interfaces can be utilized for people who are still able to control their eye movements. Such interfaces suffer from the lack of a natural degree of freedom for the selection command (e.g., a mouse click). One workaround for this problem is based on so-called dwell times, which easily leads to errors if the users do not pay close attention to where they are looking. We developed a multimodal interface combining eye movements and a BCI to a hybrid BCI, resulting in a robust and intuitive device for touchless interaction. This system especially is capable of dealing with different stimulus complexities.