Enhancing Brain-Computer Interface Performance by Incorporating Brain-to-Brain Coupling

Tianyu Jia; Jingyao Sun; Ciarán McGeady; Linhong Ji; Chong Li

doi:10.34133/cbsystems.0116

Enhancing Brain-Computer Interface Performance by Incorporating Brain-to-Brain Coupling

Cyborg Bionic Syst. 2024 Apr 25:5:0116. doi: 10.34133/cbsystems.0116. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Tianyu Jia^{1

2}, Jingyao Sun¹, Ciarán McGeady², Linhong Ji¹, Chong Li^{3

4

1}

Affiliations

¹ Lab of Intelligent and Biomimetic Machinery, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
² Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London, London, UK.
³ School of Clinical Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
⁴ Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

Abstract

Human cooperation relies on key features of social interaction in order to reach desirable outcomes. Similarly, human-robot interaction may benefit from integration with human-human interaction factors. In this paper, we aim to investigate brain-to-brain coupling during motor imagery (MI)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) training using eye-contact and hand-touch interaction. Twelve pairs of friends (experimental group) and 10 pairs of strangers (control group) were recruited for MI-based BCI tests concurrent with electroencephalography (EEG) hyperscanning. Event-related desynchronization (ERD) was estimated to measure cortical activation, and interbrain functional connectivity was assessed using multilevel statistical analysis. Furthermore, we compared BCI classification performance under different social interaction conditions. In the experimental group, greater ERD was found around the contralateral sensorimotor cortex under social interaction conditions compared with MI without any social interaction. Notably, EEG channels with decreased power were mainly distributed around the frontal, central, and occipital regions. A significant increase in interbrain coupling was also found under social interaction conditions. BCI decoding accuracies were significantly improved in the eye contact condition and eye and hand contact condition compared with the no-interaction condition. However, for the strangers' group, no positive effects were observed in comparisons of cortical activations between interaction and no-interaction conditions. These findings indicate that social interaction can improve the neural synchronization between familiar partners with enhanced brain activations and brain-to-brain coupling. This study may provide a novel method for enhancing MI-based BCI performance in conjunction with neural synchronization between users.