Recent and upcoming BCI progress: overview, analysis, and recommendations

Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) are finally moving out of the laboratory and beginning to gain acceptance in real-world situations. As BCIs gain attention with broader groups of users, including persons with different disabilities and healthy users, numerous practical questions gain importance. What are the most practical ways to detect and analyze brain activity in field settings? Which devices and applications are most useful for different people? How can we make BCIs more natural and sensitive, and how can BCI technologies improve usability? What are some general trends and issues, such as combining different BCIs or assessing and comparing performance? This book chapter provides an overview of the different sections of this book, providing a summary of how authors address these and other questions. We also present some predictions and recommendations that ensue from our experience from discussing these and other issues with our authors and other researchers and developers within the BCI community. We conclude that, although some directions are hard to predict, the field is definitely growing and changing rapidly, and will continue doing so in the next several years

A Hardware/Software Platform to Acquire Bioelectrical Signals. A Case Study: Characterizing Computer Access through Attention

This paper describes a hardware/software platform to acquire human body signals. In the field of physiological computing it is desirable to have a system that allows the synchronized acquisition of signals coming from different sources. Here is described how to unify the whole process of acquiring signals from both customized hardware and low cost commercial devices such as Neurosky’s mindwave. A case study using this platform is also shown: studying the feasibility of using sustained attention to access a computer. In order to do that brain activity was measured using Neurosky’s mindwave. The participants in this study were asked to keep their attention high/low for as long as possible during several trials. Experimentation was performed by 7 normally developed subjects and 3 people with cerebral palsy (CP). Our preliminary work shows that 60% of participants might be potential users of this technology. Eventually, modulating the attention to access a communication board needs a scanning period greater than 5.76s

Exploring Effects of Background Music in A Serious Game on Attention by Means of EEG Signals in Children

Music and Serious Games are separately useful alternative therapy methods for helping people with a cognitive disorder, including Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The goal of this thesis is to explore the effect of background music on children with and without ADHD. In this study, a simple Tetris game is designed with Beethoven, Mozart music, and no-music. There are different brainwave techniques for recording; among others, the electroencephalography (EEG) allows for the most efficient use of BCI. We recorded the EEG brain signals of the regular and ADHD subjects who played the Tetris we designed according to our protocol that consists of three trials with three different background music. Attention related Alpha and Beta waves of EEG signals analyzed based on time and time-frequency domain features. The changes in the data over the 1-minute Tetris game sections are investigated with the Short-time Fourier Transform (STFT) method. The results showed that music has a considerable impact on attention of children. When it comes to music types, in general, Mozart music increases Beta waves while decreasing the Alpha band waves for subjects without ADHD. On the other hand, Beethoven music increased both Alpha and Beta band values for children with ADHD

Gamification in stroke rehabilitation

Stroke has a high incidence in the population and it is one of the leading causes of functional impairments among adults. Brain damage rehabilitation is still a relatively undeveloped field and some research lines are following functional motor recovery. Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) provides new techniques to overcome stroke-related motor impairments. Recent studies present the brain’s capacity in order to promote the brain plasticity. The use of the BCI for rehabilitation tries to foster three mechanisms of neuropsychology that have proven to be of radical impact in brain function recovery: Motor Imagery, Mirror Neuron and Sensoriomotor loop. In this project, we present a pilot study with a rehabilitation session based on BCI system combined with gamification. We try to demonstrate that including gamification in the rehabilitation sessions the performance is the same as the base avatar, but the engagement and entertainment of patients increase. In this pilot study is explained the whole design and development of the gamification session as well as the intervention with real patients

A Cooperative Game Using the P300 EEG-Based Brain-Computer Interface

In this paper, we present a cooperative game, Brainio Bros 300, using a brain-computer interface (BCI). The game is cooperatively controlled by two people using P300-generating color discrimination. The two users advance through the game together, one as the “player” and the other as the “supporter” providing assistance. We assumed that players would be able-bodied, while supporters would include people with severe disabilities. Through experiments using human subjects, we evaluated the subjects’ impressions of the game and its usefulness. The results of the impression evaluation showed that the subjects generally had good impressions, and there were many opinions that such cooperative games are interesting. We also discuss the possibilities of using the P300 BCI