Local and remote cooperation with virtual and robotic agents:a P300 BCI study in healthy and people living with spinal cord injury

Tidoni, Emmanuele; Abu-Alqumsan, Mohammad; Leonardis, Daniele; Kapeller, Christoph; Fusco, Gabriele; Guger, Cristoph; Hintermuller, Cristoph; Peer, Angelika; Frisoli, Antonio; Tecchia, Franco; Bergamasco, Massimo; Aglioti, Salvatore Maria

Abstract

The development of technological applications that allow people to control and embody external devices within social interaction settings represents a major goal for current and future brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. Prior research has suggested that embodied systems may ameliorate BCI end-user's experience and accuracy in controlling external devices. Along these lines, we developed an immersive P300-based BCI application with a head-mounted display for virtual-local and robotic-remote social interactions and explored in a group of healthy participants the role of proprioceptive feedback in the control of a virtual surrogate (Study 1). Moreover, we compared the performance of a small group of people with spinal cord injury (SCI) to a control group of healthy subjects during virtual and robotic social interactions (Study 2), where both groups received a proprioceptive stimulation. Our attempt to combine immersive environments, BCI technologies and neuroscience of body ownership suggests that providing realistic multisensory feedback still represents a challenge. Results have shown that healthy and people living with SCI used the BCI within the immersive scenarios with good levels of performance (as indexed by task accuracy, optimizations calls and Information Transfer Rate) and perceived control of the surrogates. Proprioceptive feedback did not contribute to alter performance measures and body ownership sensations. Further studies are necessary to test whether sensorimotor experience represents an opportunity to improve the use of future embodied BCI applications.

Citation

Tidoni, E., Abu-Alqumsan, M., Leonardis, D., Kapeller, C., Fusco, G., Guger, C., …Aglioti, S. M. (2017). Local and remote cooperation with virtual and robotic agents:a P300 BCI study in healthy and people living with spinal cord injury. IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, 25(9), 1622-1632. https://doi.org/10.1109/tnsre.2016.2626391

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 3, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Dec 23, 2016
• Publication Date: 2017-09
• Deposit Date: Mar 24, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 25, 2019
• Journal: IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering
• Print ISSN: 1534-4320
• Electronic ISSN: 1558-0210
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 25
• Issue: 9
• Pages: 1622-1632
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/tnsre.2016.2626391
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/1420867
• Publisher URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7797151
• Related Public URLs: http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/30884/