Evidence map›Paper›PMID 34413969›Full record

ArticleJournal of healthcare engineering2021

Breaching Subjects' Thoughts Privacy: A Study with Visual Stimuli and Brain-Computer Interfaces.

Mario Quiles Pérez, Enrique Tomás Martínez Beltrán, Sergio López Bernal, Alberto Huertas Celdrán, Gregorio Martínez Pérez

Open access · hybridAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Journal of healthcare engineering, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
1citing papers in PubMed
0.9field-weighted citation impact, top 28% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

1 citing paper in PubMed, 11 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Review
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.

Mario Quiles PérezDepartamento de Ingeniería de la Información y las Comunicaciones, University of Murcia, Murcia 30100, Spain.ORCID 0000-0002-3513-3749
Enrique Tomás Martínez BeltránDepartamento de Ingeniería de la Información y las Comunicaciones, University of Murcia, Murcia 30100, Spain.ORCID 0000-0002-5169-2815
Sergio López BernalDepartamento de Ingeniería de la Información y las Comunicaciones, University of Murcia, Murcia 30100, Spain.ORCID 0000-0003-1869-1965
Alberto Huertas CeldránCommunication Systems Group (CSG), Department of Informatics (IfI), University of Zürich UZH, CH-8050 Zürich, Switzerland.ORCID 0000-0001-7125-1710
Gregorio Martínez PérezDepartamento de Ingeniería de la Información y las Comunicaciones, University of Murcia, Murcia 30100, Spain.ORCID 0000-0001-5532-6604
Universidad de Murcia · ESUniversity of Zurich · CH

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) started being used in clinical scenarios, reaching nowadays new fields such as entertainment or learning. Using BCIs, neuronal activity can be monitored for various purposes, with the study of the central nervous system response to certain stimuli being one of them, being the case of evoked potentials. However, due to the sensitivity of these data, the transmissions must be protected, with blockchain being an interesting approach to ensure the integrity of the data. This work focuses on the visual sense, and its relationship with the P300 evoked potential, where several open challenges related to the privacy of subjects' information and thoughts appear when using BCI. The first and most important challenge is whether it would be possible to extract sensitive information from evoked potentials. This aspect becomes even more challenging and dangerous if the stimuli are generated when the subject is not aware or conscious that they have occurred. There is an important gap in this regard in the literature, with only one work existing dealing with subliminal stimuli and BCI and having an unclear methodology and experiment setup. As a contribution of this paper, a series of experiments, five in total, have been created to study the impact of visual stimuli on the brain tangibly. These experiments have been applied to a heterogeneous group of ten subjects. The experiments show familiar visual stimuli and gradually reduce the sampling time of known images, from supraliminal to subliminal. The study showed that supraliminal visual stimuli produced P300 potentials about 50% of the time on average across all subjects. Reducing the sample time between images degraded the attack, while the impact of subliminal stimuli was not confirmed. Additionally, younger subjects generally presented a shorter response latency. This work corroborates that subjects' sensitive data can be extracted using visual stimuli and P300.

Indexed as

Brain-Computer InterfacesHumansPrivacy

Identifiers

PMID34413969
PMCPMC8370826
OpenAlexW3188815020

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.