The Fastest BCI for Writing Chinese Characters Using Brain Waves

Abstract

This paper presents a BCI (brain-computer interface) system called, "fast Phonics-to-Chinese-Character system", for individuals to write Chinese Characters using his or her brain waves. This research proposes a novel timing coding method to collocate the order of stimuli presentation. Previously, we had developed a Phonics-to-Chinese-Character system that used both the components of the P300 and the N200 of ERPs (event-related potentials) to detect the targets of a user's intention. Although the previously proposed system achieved good performance, we still tried to reduce the time spent on selecting an item. Based on experiences from previous studies, we propose four rules to collocate the timing of stimuli presentation for brain-computer interface, and then introduce a faster system. The results of the clinical experiments show that the proposed method elicits potentials of brain waves effectively for determining a target that was his/her intention. The accuracy of the system is above 95%. The proposed system is also the fastest BCI for writing Chinese characters via brain waves known today. The proposed system was verified as having high academic value and practicability.