P300-based brain computer interface: reliability and performance in healthy and paralysed participants
Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 29, 2026
Assessment and Communication for People with Disorders of Consciousness
Published on: August 1, 2017
F Piccione1, F Giorgi, P Tonin
1IRCCS, S. Camillo Hospital, Alberoni, 70, 30126 Venice, Italy. piccioneparrinello@aliceposta.it
Objective:
This study aimed to describe the use of the P300 event-related potential as a control signal in a brain computer interface (BCI) for healthy and paralysed participants.
Methods:
The experimental device used the P300 wave to control the movement of an object on a graphical interface. Visual stimuli, consisting of four arrows (up, right, down, left) were randomly presented in peripheral positions on the screen. Participants were instructed to recognize only the arrow indicating a specific direction for an object to move. P300 epochs, synchronized with the stimulus, were analyzed on-line via Independent Component Analysis (ICA) with subsequent feature extraction and classification by using a neural network.
Results:
We tested the reliability and the performance of the system in real-time. The system needed a short training period to allow task completion and reached good performance. Nonetheless, severely impaired patients had lower performance than healthy participants.
Conclusions:
The proposed system is effective for use with healthy participants, whereas further research is needed before it can be used with locked-in syndrome patients.
Significance:
The P300-based BCI described can reliably control, in 'real time', the motion of a cursor on a graphical interface, and no time-consuming training is needed in order to test possible applications for motor-impaired patients.
