A P300 based online brain-computer interface system for virtual hand control

Brain-computer interface (BCI) is a communication system that can help lock-in patients to interact with the outside environment by translating brain signals into machine commands. The present work provides a design for a virtual reality (VR) based BCI system that allows human participants to control a virtual hand to make gestures by P300 signals, with a positive peak of potential about 300 ms posterior to the onset of target stimulus. In this virtual environment, the participants can obtain a more immersed experience with the BCI system, such as controlling a virtual hand or walking around in the virtual world. Methods of modeling the virtual hand and analyzing the P300 signals are also described in detail. Template matching and support vector machine were used as the P300 classifier and the experiment results showed that both algorithms perform well in the system. After a short time of practice, most participants could learn to control the virtual hand during the online experiment with greater than 70% accuracy.