Brain–Computer Interfaces - Index of

260 J. Mellinger and G. Schalk
mapping of cortical function using ECoG [3, 20, 24, 26]; the optimization of BCI
signal processing routines [5, 23, 37]; the demonstration that two-dimensional hand
movement trajectories can be decoded from ECoG signals [25]; and evaluation of
steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) for the BCI purpose [1]. A number
of these studies were done across different laboratories, thereby taking advantage of
the common exchange of data and experimental paradigms supported by BCI2000.
In summary, BCI2000 is a critical tool for challenging one of the greatest problems
with BCIs: the need for considerable time and energy to set up and configure a
BCI system. Much BCI research still involves laboratory demonstrations of highly
specialized and mutually incompatible BCI systems, or only isolated components
of a BCI such as a new signal processing mechanism. By providing a straightforward,
easy, usable platform with strong support, BCI2000 has strongly catalyzed
the emerging transition to flexible, practical, and clinically relevant BCI systems.
This transition is essential to making BCIs practical to severely disabled and other
users.
As indicated by the above descriptions of its capacities, its utility for many different
aspects of BCI research, the success of its wide dissemination, and its growing
prominence in the scientific literature, BCI2000 is fast becoming, or perhaps has
already become, a standard software platform for BCI research and development.
BCI2000 is available free of charge with full documentation and complete source
code at http://www.bci2000.org for research and educational purposes. See Sect. 5
for further information about dissemination and availability.
In this book chapter, we will introduce the reader to the BCI2000 system and give
an overview of its design, capabilities, and use. We will also present a number of
scenarios that are typical of applications in BCI research, and discuss how BCI2000
may be used to implement them. While all these scenarios are different, we show
how each of them benefits from the use of the system.
BCI2000 facilitates the implementation of different BCI systems and other psychophysiological
experiments by substantially reducing labor and cost. It does
this mainly by providing a number of capable BCI and stimulus presentation
paradigms that can either be configured by the investigator or adapted by a software
engineer. Because BCI2000 is based on a system model that can describe
any BCI system, because its underlying framework is highly generic, and because
BCI2000 does not require third-party components, its use is most beneficial in
large collaborative research programs with many concurrent and different experiments
in different locations. BCI2000 provides these benefits through the following
features:
1.1 Proven Components
BCI2000 is provided with fully documented components that have proven to work
robustly in many different BCI and other experiments. By its modular design,
BCI2000 tries to avoid redundancies in code, and re-uses modules and code in multiple
contexts rather than reduplicating it. One of the advantages of this approach is