{"id":"doi:10.3390/biomimetics11090613","kind":"article","title":"A Few-Channel Brain-Computer Interface System Based on a Heuristic Algorithm","authors":["Luo J","Yu J","Cao H","Tan Q","Chen J","Xiao J"],"author_count":6,"year":2026,"published":"2026-09-01","venue":"Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland)","cited_by":0,"doi":"10.3390/biomimetics11090613","arxiv_id":null,"nct_id":null,"source_url":"https://doi.org/10.3390/biomimetics11090613","archive_url":"https://space-kitty.com/papers/doi:10.3390/biomimetics11090613","updated":null,"pmid":"42782640","pmcid":"PMC13604601","openalex_id":null,"pdf_url":"https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC13604601/pdf","abstract":"Traditional P300 brain-computer interface (BCI) systems rely on multi-channel EEG acquisition, causing cumbersome setup, lengthy preparation, and high user workloads, which limits their real-world application. To enhance practicality, this paper proposes a fixed few-channel selection framework based on a heuristic algorithm to balance decoding performance and user experience. We integrated a genetic algorithm (GA) with Bayesian linear discriminant analysis (BLDA) to identify a strongly generalizable few-channel combination from a traditional eight-channel system, avoiding costly subject-specific recalibration. Validating this method, 48 healthy subjects completed rigorous offline and online virtual reality (VR) experiments. Results showed that the proposed three-channel system maintained highly comparable accuracy and information transfer rates to the eight-channel system, showing no significant performance degradation. Crucially, the few-channel scheme reduced equipment preparation time by 90% (from 30 to 3 min). Furthermore, NASA-TLX workload evaluations confirmed a significant reduction in users' psychological and physical burdens ( p < 0.05). Ultimately, while preserving core interaction performance, this few-channel strategy vastly improves user experience and system practicality, offering key theoretical and practical support for implementing lightweight, user-friendly BCI systems.","abstract_license":"CC-BY (article license as recorded by Europe PMC; abstract reproduced unmodified apart from markup removal)","license":"CC-BY","is_open_access":true,"retracted":false,"peer_reviewed":null,"categories":[],"details":null,"provenance":"europepmc","attribution":"Abstract of \"A Few-Channel Brain-Computer Interface System Based on a Heuristic Algorithm\" by Luo J, Yu J, Cao H et al., https://doi.org/10.3390/biomimetics11090613, used under its Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY); markup removed, otherwise unmodified.","topics":[{"slug":"brain-computer-interfaces","name":"Brain-Computer Interfaces","domain_slug":"neuroscience"}],"cited_in_dossiers":[]}