Effects of Skin Friction on Tactile P300 Brain-Computer Interface Performance

Abstract

Tactile perception, the primary sensing channel of the tactile brain-computer interface (BCI), is a complicated process. Skin friction plays a vital role in tactile perception. This study aimed to examine the effects of skin friction on tactile P300 BCI performance. Two kinds of oddball paradigms were designed, silk-stim paradigm (SSP) and linen-stim paradigm (LSP), in which silk and linen were wrapped on target vibration motors, respectively. In both paradigms, the disturbance vibrators were wrapped in cotton. The experimental results showed that LSP could induce stronger event-related potentials (ERPs) and achieved a higher classification accuracy and information transfer rate (ITR) compared with SSP. The findings indicate that high skin friction can achieve high performance in tactile BCI. This work provides a novel research direction and constitutes a viable basis for the future tactile P300 BCI, which may benefit patients with visual impairments.