Asynchronous Control of ERP-Based BCI Spellers Using Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials Elicited by Peripheral Stimuli

Brain-computer interface (BCI) spellers based on event related potentials (ERPs) are intrinsically synchronous systems. Therefore, selections are constantly made, even when users are not paying attention to the stimuli. This poses a major limitation in real-life applications, in which an asynchronous control is required. The aim of this study is to design, develop and test a novel method to discriminate whether the user is controlling the system (i.e., control state) or is engaged in other task (i.e., non-control state). To achieve such an asynchronous control, our method detects the steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) elicited by peripheral stimuli of ERP-based spellers. A characterization experiment was conducted with 5 subjects to investigate general aspects of this phenomenon. Then, the proposed method was validated with 15 subjects in offline and online sessions. Results show that the proposed method provides a reliable asynchronous control, achieving an average accuracy of 95.5% for control state detection during the online sessions. Furthermore, our approach is independent of the ERP classification stage, and to the best of our knowledge, is the first procedure that does not need to extend the duration of the calibration sessions to acquire non-control observations.