Asynchronous steady-state visual evoked potential brain-computer interface application: True and false positive rate comparison between with and without eye-tracking switch paradigms

Due to the bypass of muscle activity or peripheral nerve control, brain-computer interface (BCI) technique has advantages in different fields such as medical field for the rehabilitation of paralyzed patients. Steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) has been widely adopted in BCI applications. SSVEP based BCIs have the advantages of high information transfer rate, less or no need of training, and strong anti-interference, which could be used in the more natural asynchronous BCI application with control of the users rather than the operant system of the synchronous mode. In order to solve the problem of high false positive rate (FPR) in common asynchronous SSVEP BCI applications, this paper proposed an eye-tracking switch based BCI paradigm to reduce the FPR and to improve the performance of the asynchronous BCI system. In the proposed paradigm, the fixation point position instead of EEG signal is used to determine whether the system is in idle state. Experimental results showed that when eye-tracking switch was applied in the asynchronous SSVEP BCI, the FPR was reduced to less than 10% and the recognition accuracy (i.e., the true positive rate, TPR) can also be improved to a certain extent, which proved the applicability of the eye-tracking switch in asynchronous BCI applications.