Building a Brain to Computer Interaction

I’ve developed my first Brain-Computer-Interaction! (BCI) A user puts on an EEG headband, data is sent from the headband to a web app I’ve written, and that app uses an algorithm to determine whether or not the user is focusing. The graph you are seeing shows a user’s concentration and immersion over time while using the app. It takes the subjective and makes it objective, allowing us to ask more detailed questions about experience. I will be conducting some studies using this, and I hope that I can get the opportunity to make something meaningful with it in the future. Right now, I’m happy to share what I’ve learned and made so far!

First of all, I didn’t start from scratch. BCI has been an interest of mine for several years. I did a project in college called EverGreen based on the potential of BCI in cognitive health. That led to a long line of papers, purchases, and practice. I’ve written a previous blog with an overview of what I have learned. But for this breakthrough, I used the research published by the Seoul National University of Science and Technology (SNUST), Muse EEG, React, EEGedu.com, Muse-JS, and IBM’s Carbon design system. Tying these sources together, I was able to reproduce a version of the test from SNUST. The app produced predictable results : measuring attention in the participants, and detecting when a test was thrown.

The web app uses the ratio between brainwaves in the frontal cortex to detect four states of focus. It can show whether a person is concentrating, immersed, attentive, and — by omission of the first three — disconnected. Concentration is a user’s focus while still being aware of their surroundings. Immersion is focus without that awareness. Attentiveness is my own definition for the baseline ready-state for focus. Disconnection is my definition for brainwave ratios below the attentiveness baseline. This is when a user’s mind is “wandering.” These four states give an objective insight to a user’s experience.

I used the app to test several scenarios and will use the results to inform a bigger project. I constructed experiments to to see if there is a connection was between these four states of focus and our day-to-day activities. Are we immersed when we are being creative? Are we concentrated when being analytical? Does a series of tasks produce the same focus as a single long one? Attention is foundational. Attention can mean the difference between listening and daydreaming. It can be the line between safety and danger. What patterns should designers look for and build on? I plan to make a hypothesis out of my findings, and conduct a study to dive deeper into this problem space. 

I’m far from done, but I am excited. We are living in a time when science fiction is becoming the signature feature of tomorrow. Jewelry powered by concentration, games built around focus, and every-day experiences augmented by real-time thoughts. What if we could design table saws that shut off when the user is daydreaming? What if our phones switched to silent when we were concentrating? What type of world could we design?