Simultaneous induction of SSMVEP and SMR Using a Gaiting video stimulus: a novel hybrid brain-computer interface

We proposed a novel visual stimulus for brain-computer interface. The stimulus is in the form gaiting sequence of a human. The hypothesis is that observing such a visual stimulus would simultaneously induce 1) steady-state motion visual evoked potential (SSMVEP) in the occipital area, similarly to an SSVEP stimulus; and 2) sensorimotor rhythm (SMR) in the primary sensorimotor area, because such action observation (AO) could activate the mirror neuron system. Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) was used to detect SSMVEP from occipital EEG, and event-related spectral perturbations (ERSP) were used to identify SMR in the EEG from the sensorimotor area. The results showed that the proposed visual gaiting stimulus-induced SSMVEP, with classification accuracies of 88.9 $\pm$ 12.0% in a four-class scenario. More importantly, it induced clear and sustained event-related desynchronization/synchronization (ERD/ERS) in the EEG from the sensorimotor area, while no ERD/ERS in the sensorimotor area could be observed when the other two SSVEP stimuli were used. Further, for participants with sufficiently clear SSMVEP pattern (classification accuracy > 85%), the ERD index values in mu-beta band induced by the proposed gaiting stimulus were statistically different from that of the other two types of stimulus. Therefore, a novel BCI based on the proposed stimulus has potential in neurorehabilitation applications because it simultaneously has the high accuracy of an SSMVEP (~90% accuracy in a four-class setup) and the ability to activate sensorimotor cortex. And such potential will be further explored in future studies.