Can a highly accurate multi-class SSMVEP BCI induce sensory-motor rhythm in the sensorimotor area?

Objective. Different visual stimuli might have different effects on the brain, e.g. the change of brightness, non-biological movement and biological movement.Approach. In this study, flicker, checkerboard and gaiting stimuli were chosen as visual stimuli to investigate whether steady-state motion visual evoked potential (SSMVEP) effect on the sensorimotor area for rehabilitation. The gaiting stimulus was designed as the gaiting sequence of a human. The hypothesis is that only observing the designed gaiting stimulus would simultaneously induce: (1) SSMVEP in the occipital area, similarly to an SSVEP stimulus; and (2) sensorimotor rhythm (SMR) in the primary sensorimotor area, because such action observation could activate the mirror neuron system. Canonical correlation analysis was used to detect SSMVEP from occipital electroencephalograms (EEG), and event-related spectral perturbation was used to identify SMR in the EEG from the sensorimotor area.Main results. The results showed that the designed gaiting stimulus-induced SSMVEP, with classification accuracies of 88.9 ± 12.0% in a four-class scenario. More importantly, it induced clear and sustained event-related desynchronization/synchronization (ERD/ERS), while no ERD/ERS could be observed when the other two SSVEP stimuli were used. Further, for participants with a sufficiently clear SSMVEP pattern (classification accuracy >85%), the ERD index values in the mu-beta band induced by the proposed gaiting stimulus were statistically different from those of the other two types of stimulus.Significance. Therefore, a novel brain-computer interface (BCI) based on the designed stimulus has potential in neurorehabilitation applications because it simultaneously has the high accuracy of an SSMVEP (sim90% accuracy in a four-class setup) and the ability to activate the sensorimotor area.