Improved motor imagery training for subject’s self-modulation in EEG-based brain-computer interface

For the electroencephalogram- (EEG-) based motor imagery (MI) brain-computer interface (BCI) system, more attention has been paid to the advanced machine learning algorithms rather than the effective MI training protocols over past two decades. However, it is crucial to assist the subjects in modulating their active brains to fulfill the endogenous MI tasks during the calibration process, which will facilitate signal processing using various machine learning algorithms. Therefore, we propose a trial-feedback paradigm to improve MI training and introduce a non-feedback paradigm for comparison. Each paradigm corresponds to one session. Two paradigms are applied to the calibration runs of corresponding sessions. And their effectiveness is verified in the subsequent testing runs of respective sessions. Different from the non-feedback paradigm, the trial-feedback paradigm presents a topographic map and its qualitative evaluation in real time after each MI training trial, so the subjects can timely realize whether the current trial successfully induces the event-related desynchronization/event-related synchronization (ERD/ERS) phenomenon, and then they can adjust their brain rhythm in the next MI trial. Moreover, after each calibration run of the trial-feedback session, a feature distribution is visualized and quantified to show the subjects’ abilities to distinguish different MI tasks and promote their self-modulation in the next calibration run. Additionally, if the subjects feel distracted during the training processes of the non-feedback and trial-feedback sessions, they can execute the blinking movement which will be captured by the electrooculogram (EOG) signals, and the corresponding MI training trial will be abandoned. Ten healthy participants sequentially performed the non-feedback and trial-feedback sessions on the different days. The experiment results showed that the trial-feedback session had better spatial filter visualization, more beneficiaries, higher average off-line and on-line classification accuracies than the non-feedback session, suggesting the trial-feedback paradigm’s usefulness in subject’s self-modulation and good ability to perform MI tasks.