A P300-based BCI system for controlling computer cursor movement

A P300-based BCI (brain-computer interface) system for controlling the movement of the cursor displayed on the computer screen was proposed and evaluated. On the LCD computer screen, the cursor was displayed with the surrounded eight small circles, each of which was blinked sequentially in a random order. Five healthy subjects were requested to gaze at one of the circles placed in the preferred direction. The P300 activities elicited by the random blink of the target circle were detected by pattern classifier and they were used to move the cursor to the same direction as the target circle. It was shown that all of the subjects could control the movement of the cursor to their preferred direction by moving their gaze point in a short distance. This system can be applied to the voluntary control of the movement of the computer cursor, and the navigation of robot or video camera, without using users' extremities.