MYND: Unsupervised Evaluation of Novel BCI Control Strategies on Consumer Hardware

Matthias R. Hohmann, Lisa Konieczny, Michelle Hackl, Brian Wirth, Talha Zaman, Raffi Enficiaud, Moritz Grosse-Wentrup, Bernhard Schölkopf

Abstract: Neurophysiological laboratory studies are often constraint to immediate geographical surroundings and access to equipment may be temporally restricted. Limitations of ecological validity, scalability, and generalizability of findings pose a significant challenge for the development of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which ultimately need to function in any context, on consumer-grade hardware. We introduce MYND: An open-source framework that couples consumer-grade recording hardware with an easy-to-use application for the unsupervised evaluation of BCI control strategies. Subjects are guided through experiment selection, hardware fitting, recording, and data upload in order to self-administer multi-day studies that include neurophysiological recordings and questionnaires at home. As a use case, thirty subjects evaluated two BCI control strategies "Positive memories" and "Music imagery" by using a four-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) with MYND. Neural activity in both control strategies could be decoded with an average offline accuracy of 68.5% and 64.0% across all days.