Can vibrotactile stimulation and tDCS help inefficient BCI users?
Kyungho Won, Heegyu Kim, Daeun Gwon and 3 others
PMID 37143057WHAT IT FOUND
Closed-loop vibrotactile stimulation significantly improved motor imagery BCI performance in low performers, raising accuracy from 52.5% to 61.63%. tDCS showed a non-significant trend.
High performers declined in all groups, suggesting stimulation benefits only those struggling to control the interface.
Key findings
01Low performers in the vibrotactile stimulation group achieved significantly improved BCI performance after the session (p = 0.0053), increasing from 52.5% to 61.63%.
02Low performers in the tDCS group showed improved BCI performance (51.12% to 56.25%), but the difference was not statistically significant.
03High performers' BCI performance decreased across all stimulation groups, with a significant decrease in the sham group (p = 0.048).
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The sample size was small, particularly for high performers (only three in the vibrotactile group and four in the tDCS group), making results for this subgroup unreliable. The study used a single-day session, so it is unclear if the observed effects would persist or accumulate over multiple days of training. All subjects performed motor imagery tasks before, during, and after stimulation, so practice effects or fatigue may have influenced performance changes, although the sham group showed minimal change. The vibrotactile stimulation was not perfectly targeted to the alpha falling phase due to technical constraints, with only about 50% of falling phases successfully stimulated. The study recruited healthy subjects, so the results may not apply to clinical populations with motor or cognitive impairments. The classifier hyperparameters were changed after the first ten subjects, which could introduce variability in performance evaluation.
Declared interests
The study was funded by the Institute of Information and Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation, South Korea. The authors declared no other conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the significant improvement in low performers or the decrease in high performers as evidence that vibrotactile stimulation is superior to tDCS or that these effects are clinically applicable to patients. The study was conducted on healthy individuals in a single session, and the sample size for high performers was too small to draw reliable conclusions about their response to stimulation.