doi:10.1155/2007/79642 Research Article Self-Paced (Asynchronous) BCI Control of aWheelchair in Virtual Environments: A Case Study with a Tetraplegic

The aim of the present study was to demonstrate for the first time that brain waves can be used by a tetraplegic to control move-ments of his wheelchair in virtual reality (VR). In this case study, the spinal cord injured (SCI) subject was able to generate bursts of beta oscillations in the electroencephalogram (EEG) by imagination of movements of his paralyzed feet. These beta oscillations were used for a self-paced (asynchronous) brain-computer interface (BCI) control based on a single bipolar EEG recording. The subject was placed inside a virtual street populated with avatars. The task was to “go ” from avatar to avatar towards the end of the street, but to stop at each avatar and talk to them. In average, the participant was able to successfully perform this asynchronous experiment with a performance of 90%, single runs up to 100%. Copyright © 2007 Robert Leeb et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1