SSVEP-based BCI: A “Plug & play” approach

Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) can provide users with an alternative/augmentative interaction path, based on the interpretation of their brain activity. Steady State Visual Evoked Potentials (SSVEP) paradigm has many appealing features, aiming at implementing BCI-enabled communication-control applications. In this paper, we present a complete signal processing chain for a self-paced, SSVEP-based BCI. The proposed approach mostly focuses at reducing the user effort in dealing with BCI, featuring no need of user-specific calibration or training. In this paper, the classification algorithm is introduced and first validated on offline waveforms, aiming at improving classification accuracy and minimizing the false positive rate. Then, implementation of an online, self-paced SSVEP BCI is illustrated. The scheme refers to a four-way choice and exploits discrimination between intentional control states and nocontrol ones. Good performance is achieved, both in terms of true positive rate (>94%), as well as low false positive rate (0.26 min-1), even in experiments carried out outside lab-controlled conditions.