A Paradigm to Enhance Motor Imagery through Immersive Virtual Reality with Visuo-Tactile Stimulus

Motor imagery brain-computer interfaces have a wide range of promising applications in medical, entertainment and home applications, however, such problems as few motor imagery brain-computer paradigms and weak EEG features need to be addressed. In order to explore good experimental paradigms to induce users to perform motor imagery tasks more effectively, provide more effective EEG features and save training time and increase system robustness, this paper designs a novel motor imagination brain-computer interaction paradigm, which combines virtual reality and haptic stimulation to provide synchronized visual-haptic feedback to the system and enhance the user's motor imagination ability. The experimental results show that there are significant differences between the traditional paradigms and the proposed paradigm in terms of event-related spectral perturbations, which are more obvious in the 10-20Hz and 25-30Hz in the proposed, and the embodiment scores in the proposed paradigm are also higher. In summary, the proposed paradigm can improve users' motor imagery ability by enhancing their embodiments.