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Designing Future BCIs: Beyond the Bit Rate

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Towards Practical Brain-Computer Interfaces

Abstract

The last 20 years of success in BCI design have led to the realisation of basic control functions by engineers, psychologists, machine learners and end users. These basic functions provide us with the freedom to design future BCI applications that go beyond the reliability of isolated intention detection events. Such a design process for the overall system comprises finding a suitable control metaphor, respecting neuroergonomic principles, designing visually aesthetic feedback, dealing with the learnability of the system, creating an effective application structure (navigation), and exploring the power of social aspects of an interactive BCI system.Designing a human-machine system also involves eliciting a user’s knowledge, preferences, requirements and priorities. In order not to overload end users with evaluation tasks and to take into account issues specific to BCI, techniques and processes from other fields that aim to acquire these must be adapted for applications that use BCI. We present examples which illustrate this process.

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Quek, M., Höhne, J., Murray-Smith, R., Tangermann, M. (2012). Designing Future BCIs: Beyond the Bit Rate. In: Allison, B., Dunne, S., Leeb, R., Del R. Millán, J., Nijholt, A. (eds) Towards Practical Brain-Computer Interfaces. Biological and Medical Physics, Biomedical Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29746-5_9

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