JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The number of people suffering from cognitive deficits and diseases, such as stroke, dementia or ADHD, is rising due to an ageing and growing population. Neurofeedback training using brain-computer interfaces is emerging as a means of easy to use and non-invasive cognitive training and rehabilitation. A novel application of neurofeedback training using a P300-based brain-computer interface has previously shown potential to improve attention in healthy adults.

Objective:

The main objective of this study is to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of three different task difficulty adaptation approaches in a P300-based brain-computer interface application for attention training.

Methods:

45 healthy adults will be recruited and randomly assigned to the experimental group or one of two control groups. This study involves a single training session, where participants receive neurofeedback training via a P300 speller task. During this training, the number of flashes per row and column is increased or decreased to make the task easier or harder, respectively. Decreasing the number of flashes per row and column, and thus decreasing the number of trials to average over, increases the signal-to-noise ratio, which makes it harder for the participants to maintain their performance. This encourages the participants to improve their focus. The task difficulty is either adapted based on the participants’ performance (in the experimental group and control group 1) or chosen randomly (in control group 2). Changes in brain patterns pre- and post-training will be analysed to study the effectiveness of the different approaches. Participants will complete a random dot motion task before and after the training, so that any transfer effects of the training to other cognitive tasks can be evaluated. Questionnaires will be used to estimate the participants’ fatigue and compare the perceived workload of the training between groups.

Results:

This study has been approved by the Maynooth University Ethics Committee (BSRESC-2022-2474456) and is registered on clinicaltrials.gov (NCT05576649). Participant recruitment and data collection began in October 2022 and we expect to publish the results in 2023.

Conclusions:

This study aims to accelerate attention training using iterative learning control to optimise the task difficulty in an adaptive P300 speller task. Furthermore, we hope to replicate the results of a previous study using a P300 speller for attention training, as a benchmark comparison. Clinical Trial: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05576649