Prediction of Command Delivery Time for BCI

One of the challenges in using brain computer interfaces over extended periods of time is the uncertainty in the system. This uncertainty can be due to the user's internal states, the non stationarity of the brain signals, or the variation of the class discriminative information over time. Therefore, the users are often unable to maintain the same accuracy and time efficiency in delivering BCI commands. In this paper, we tackle the issue of variation in BCI command delivery time for a motor imagery task with the aim of providing assistance through adaptive shared control. This is important mainly because having long delivery of mental commands leads to uncertainty in the user's intent classification and limits the responsiveness of the system. In order to address this issue, we separate the trials into “long” and “short” groups so that we have the same number of trials in each group. We demonstrate that using only a few samples at the beginning of the trial, we are able to predict whether the current trial will be short or long with high accuracies (70% - 86%). Eventually, this prediction enables us to tune the shared control parameters to overcome the issue of uncertainty.