During this week Dr. Takabi gave us free reign to work with the Neurosky, another brand of BCI headset. We spent much of our time playing with it, determining how to use bluetooth to pair it with our devices and figuring out how to use it properly. We were told to read all the documentation for the headset and also explore some of the apps created for it. Because the Neurosky only has one sensor, it has limited capabilities. Most of the apps that use the Neurosky are for entertainment purposes and are mainly derived from the headsetās primary functionality, which consists of determining a personās level of meditation and level of attention. For instance, in one app the user had to control their focus in order to burn a barrel or use meditation to lift a ball. Many other apps followed this same formula, with slight tweaks. There were also many applications that were used for practical purposes, like assisting those with disabilities by using a personās blink to select certain text and phrases.Ā
Dr. Takabi then informed us that we were to create an app using the Neurosky. Our group was split up into people working on an Android application or a PC application. I chose to work with Android, and we set off to determine what we should create.Ā
After some brainstorming we decided to create a simple cursor that could be controlled with oneās meditation and attention. For example, when a personās meditation is high, the cursor would move to the right across the screen, if low, it would move left. If oneās attention was high then the cursor would move downward on the y axis, and if low it would move upward along the y axis. We fiddled with getting Eclipse to work, and began attempting to implement our idea. The actual process was not too difficult since there was a decent amount of code provided for the Neurosky.Ā
One of the most challenging aspects of this application was when we attempted to allow the cursor toĀ āselectā something on the screen when a user blinked. We were able to finally accomplish this and added a webview to the app so that a user could traverse the web and select buttons by blinking when the cursor hovered over them. Unfortunately, we were not able to make it so that the cursor could use the keyboard if the user selected a text box.Ā
Although implementing this app was cool, I found that actually controlling ones meditation and attention was extremely difficult. Eventually it got somewhat easier to control my focus to move the cursor upwards and downwards as I discovered different methods (singing a song in my head, thinking of a single word over and over), but I had virtually no way to control the left and right movements as there were fewer methods to control my meditation. I thought this caused an issue with the overall app and made it much less practical.Ā
The last day of this week we wanted to try doing something slightly different, but expanding off of our initial idea. We decided weād once again use meditation and attention, but instead have it so that it could control a toy car. To do this we used a Raspberry Pi and found some code that interfaced with the Mindwave Mobile. After brainstorming the idea that morning, we were able to successfully control the toy car with our mind after just one day.Ā
All of these projects were very interesting to work on, but it was difficult to determine what new steps we should take with what we created. We seemed to hit a roadblock with our cursor app, but it seemed like we were expected to do more. I would say that we needed a tad bit more direction and we will hopefully discuss this with Takabi next week when he returns.Ā