Helping You Focus and Relax With BCIs
Being able to properly focus on the task at hand is an issue that everyone battles with throughout their life. Many find their solutions, like the right music or a certain scent, but some are unable to tell what actually helps them focus and what is just detrimental to their work. For a long time there was never a true way to find out what helped you focus, that is until brain computer interfaces came onto the scene. Now, we can quantify focus and relaxation levels so that anyone can find the things that help them get into the right mental state. That is the basic idea behind my program, which can tell anyone if they are focused or relaxed after performing a certain activity.
How to Quantify Mental States
It is easy to understand the loose concepts of focus and relaxation, but quantifying those concepts is where it gets complex. The way that our brain makes us focus or relax is through the production of electrical pulses in the head which we call brainwaves. Like any other wave, these brainwaves have frequencies, and depending on the frequency we can tell what kind of wave is being produced in the brain. The two main waves that are seen in this project are the beta and alpha waves, since the production of beta waves leads to focus, and production of alpha waves leads to relaxation. So as long as we are able to collect the frequency of these brain waves, we are able to tell what kind of mental state a person is in. However, that introduces a new issue, how do we collect that kind of data? Well that is all possible through brain computer interface technology.
What are Brain Computer Interfaces?
Brain computer interfaces, or BCIs for short, are devices that can read brainwave frequencies and send it to an external computer for a use in a program. It does this by recording those aforementioned electrical pulses with an electrode, and then processing the raw EEG data (the electrical data) into frequencies that can be used by the external device. The device then uses the numbers in any way the coded program tells it. BCIs are used in many different ways, such as research, as control inputs, or as data points for a machine learning algorithm. For this project I am using the frequencies as reference points to tell if a person is focused or relaxed.
How Does the Program Work?
As said before, when there is a large production of a certain wave that means that the person is in or going towards the correlating mental state. For example, if the BCI was picking up a lot of beta wave frequencies then that means the person is focused or becoming focused. Using this knowledge I was able to create a program that could classify the incoming frequencies as focused or not focused when the focus option was selected, and relaxed or not relaxed if the relaxed option was selected. Depending on which option was selected a specific frequency band would be recorded, where the focused option would record the beat wave band and the relaxed option would record the alpha wave band. This allowed the program to classify more efficiently as it was looking specifically at the band that would hold the frequencies needed. I created parameters for this classification program by doing multiple trials of me doing math questions constantly through a time period, then finding what the average range was for my focused state. Through this classification program, I was able to create a project that could tell if a person was focused or relaxed through brainwave data.
One Limitation
Now with any first iteration, there are obviously drawbacks that need to be solved. The main limitation that was seen with this program is that right now it is only specialized to me. Everyone has different ranges when it comes to their focus or relaxed mental states. To create initial parameters for this program, I used my own EEG data as a reference which means that this program would only work for me and people who have similar mental ranges as me. However, in the future I hope to integrate this program with an AI model that can train on a persons data to make the program specialized for them.
What am I Doing in the Future
From here, I hope to further improve my BCI skills by exploring topics such as mnepython and also learning how to integrate this technology with AI and other techs as well. If you want to see more of these kind of projects, be sure to follow my page and come back in the future.
