A Portable and Wearable Visual Brain-Computer Interface for Assessing Patients With Disorders of Consciousness

The JFK Coma Recovery Scale-Revised (JFK CRSR) is a clinical behavioral method for assessing patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC). However, due to severe brain injury, the DOC patients may lack sufficient behavioral responses, leading to a relatively high clinical misdiagnosis rate of the JFK CRS-R. To address this limitation, this study developed a portable and wearable Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) to evaluate the visual tracking abilities of the DOC patients and enhance the diagnostic accuracy of the JFK CRS-R. During the experiment, patients wore an Electroencephalogram headband, and the Graphical User Interface of the BCI presented four human images with a background captured by a camera. A target human image was randomly selected, then the four images alternately flashed until the target moved to its initial position. The system guided patients to concentrate their attention on the moving target. In a case study, the BCI system was applied to a patient diagnosed with a minimally conscious state (MCS). In contrast to the lack of visual tracking behavior in CRS-R, our experiment result showed a significant accuracy of 60% achieved by the MCS patient, emphasizing the visual tracking abilities of the MCS patients and highlighting the effectiveness of the system.