Usability and Cost-effectiveness in Brain-Computer Interaction: Is it User Throughput or Technology Related?

In recent years, Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have been steadily gaining ground in the market, used either as an implicit or explicit input method in computers for accessibility, entertainment or rehabilitation. Past research in BCI has heavily neglected the human aspect in the loop, focusing mostly in the machine layer. Further, due to the high cost of current BCI systems, many studies rely on low-cost and low-quality equipment with difficulties to provide significant advancements in physiological computing. OpenSource projects are offered as alternatives to expensive medical equipment. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of such systems over their cost is still unclear, and whether they can deliver the same level of experience as their more expensive counterparts. 

So far, we found no significant differences in the online performance among the 3 EEG headsets from the set of data derived from both subjective sources - through the questionnaires - as well as objective data - derived from the online performance. Given the current findings, devices seem to have similar effectiveness and we can conclude that there is no perceived difference in terms of comfort, appearance, speed/ease of setup and overall workload in the actual system performance. Hence, the low-cost openBCI open source system is the more cost-effective BCI solution as compared with its commercial medical grade counterparts.

Although we cannot directly compare classification scores, a comparison with a similar P300 study that considered different electrode configurations across systems, and a different interaction paradigm (P300 vs MI) revealed that regardless of the BCI paradigm, usability and CER analysis indicate that medical grade and more expensive systems do not necessarily add value on the experience level of the users. Therefore, we can conclude that brain-computer interaction performance/throughput, at least for the particular case of non-expert users, is not technology related and it can be accomplished without requiring high-end and high-cost devices. Current results provide useful pointers towards leveraging research of Brain-Computer Interaction for nonexpert users and minimizing BCI illiteracy

Reference:

Vourvopoulos, A., & Bermúdez i Badia, S. (2016). Usability and Cost-effectiveness in Brain-Computer Interaction: Is it User Throughput or Technology Related? In Proceedings of the 7th Augmented Human International Conference. Geneva, Switzerland: ACM. http://doi.org/10.1145/2875194.2875244 (Download) (Cite)