Brain-Computer Interface: Challenges and Research Perspectives

Nowadays, the interest in the Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) domain is continuously growing, only judging by the number of BCI related papers published or presented in neuro-engineering or neuroscience journals, conferences or workshops. In all these studies, brain activity is considered as a simple modality of providing a system or a device with knowledge from human interactions. Although this simple transfer of information represents a significant development since BCI also integrates brain signals with data from sources like speech, eye gaze, gestures, facial expressions, body postures or physiological measures like heart rate, blood pressure or electrodermal activity. This fusion creates a context-aware and a context-dependent interpretation of the brain signals but represents in the same time a challenge for the neuroscience researchers that must process and represent all this data for clinical or non-clinical applications. BCI has become an addictive and powerful research domain offering a wide range of applications from cognitive load in educational tasks and gaming to automotive and assistive technology. This paper aims to outline current trends in brain-computer interface development and research from the perspective of the authors' experience and scientific literature.