Long Term User Training and Preparation to Succeed in a Closed -Loop BCI Competition

Gernot Muller-Putz, Damien Coyle, Fabien Lotte, Jing Jin, David Steyri

Research output: Contribution to journalEditorialpeer-review

2 Citations (SciVal)

Abstract

Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have been researched now for about 30 years. However, evenstill,much of the work done in the lab environment is seldomapplied within the targeted end-users,for example, people with severe motor disabilities.The main goal of the research community should be to finally bring the BCI into a state inwhich the end-users can profit and gain independence and quality of life. One possibility to pushthe field into practical applications is driven by initiatives such as CYBATHLON [initiated by ETHZurich (Riener, 2016)] and other competitions. Such a competition challenges research institutionsand industry to demonstrate their developments in real-world scenarios and push the boundariesof research.In the BCI Race, at CYBATHLON (Novak et al., 2017), end-users are the pilots and they controlan avatar in a race against other pilots, by using a multi-class BCI. This competition and others areenormously demanding to the developers, as the BCI system must work properly at the time of thecompetition, out of the lab in a foreign environment, with spectators around, noise and withoutsecond chances.In China, a BCI competition was firstly organized by Tsinghua University in 2010. Since 2017,the BCI competition has been organized by China Electronics Society as part of World RoboticsConference. Thousands of users participate every year. This BCI competition consists of two parts,a user competition and an algorithm competition. Winners of the user competition compete thenin the algorithm competition to test the performance of algorithms which were uploaded by BCIresearch teams. Through these BCI competitions, a large amount of BCI data for further researchhas been obtained, which has been used to promote the progress of BCI algorithms. In the nearfuture, these data will be published online for BCI researchers all over the world.Another extremely important factor, of course, is the preparation of the team for thecompetition. In particular, the end-user pilot should be trained to produce stable and accuratemental states that produce consistent brain oscillations to control the BCI, even in a potentiallystressful environment such as in the CYBATHLON race arena.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages2
JournalFrontiers in Human Neuroscience
Volume16
Early online date24 Mar 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 24 Mar 2022

Keywords

  • brain computer interface
  • electroencephalogram
  • Transfer Learning
  • user learning
  • user-centered training
  • closed-loop learning

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Long Term User Training and Preparation to Succeed in a Closed -Loop BCI Competition'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this