Usability study of different platforms to Develop Communication Systems based on P300-Brain-Computer Interface (BCI).

Abstract

People suffering from neurodegenerative disorders, such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), can eventually present great disabilities. In some cases, these patients lose all possibility to communicate with the external world via common muscular channels, being the only alternative the use of a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) system, which transforms brain activity into external commands. A P300-speller is a typical Brain-Computer Interface system for communication purpose. In order to facilitate the communication, it is very important to adapt the speller to each patient. The most popular platforms to develop P300 speller are BCI2000, OpenVibe and UMA-BCI Speller. The goal of this study was to evaluate the usability of the three proposed platforms in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. To this end, three participants had to configure a specific speller layout using the 3 platforms. The obtained results indicated that the UMA-BCI Speller platform presented the highest level of usability, following by the BCI2000 and finally, the OpenVibe platform. In this sense, the UMA-BCI Speller seems to be an easy application to use, providing many options and allowing to configure any speller layout in an easy way.