Multi-person coded brain-computer interface based on steady-state visual evoked potential

Previous studies have made great efforts to extend available frequencies of EEG signals to increase the number of targets in steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based brain-computer interface (BCI), but most of them focused on single-person paradigms. Inspired by the idea of binary coding, we proposed a multi-person SSVEP-coded BCI paradigm, which could increase the number of targets by the cooperation of multiple participants. Fourteen subjects participated in this study, and the performance of the paradigm was evaluated by using an online two-subject cooperative experiment. The results showed that the average online accuracy of 92.83% and an information transmission rate (ITR) of 86.88 bits/min could be achieved with the proposed multi-person SSVEP-coded BCI. Compared with traditional one-person BCI paradigm, the proposed paradigm could increase the number of generated commands exponentially with the number of participants while without decrease in accuracy, which is of great significance for extending the application of BCIs.