

Emotiv - Brain Computer Interface Technology  - kvgr
http://www.emotiv.com/index.php

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siculars
I don't know much about this offering, and I am not a neuroscientist/md, but I
do know many well known and respected neurologists/epeleptologists and have
worked with them for quite a while (I currently work in the Dept. of Neurology
at a very well known institution). Nevertheless, even I know that signals
acquired from surface electrodes are very difficult to "read" let alone useful
to manipulate anything. For one, a patient who is awake and moving will
generate a very difficult to ascertain signal to noise ratio due to too much
muscle artifact. The best/most reliable I have seen via surface electrodes are
simple binary commands along the lines of "move the dot on the screen up or
down" (my brother did that as his senior thesis for his undergrad bio-
engineering major).

Now, the guys at emotiv may have devised a way to enhance the electrodes
and/or filter out artifact but I would really have to put this to some of my
scientist buddies who would actually know what is going on under the hood
here. I am inclined to think they have not because I haven't heard any
excitement from any of the neurologists in the epilepsy division. I've seen
expert technicians actually apply electrodes both surface and implanted (aka.
in the operating room with ones brain exposed). Let's talk surface. There is a
lot of expert care and skill that goes into setting up electrodes (and in
specific places). On top of that, the electrodes are generally coated with a
gel. All of this to enhance the electrical signal. The headset from emotiv
looks like it is dry and how do you know if it is positioned properly?

tl;dr, I would love to think this has real value but I just don't think so.

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eykanal
This technology is cool, yes, but it works pretty terribly. I've done work
with this device in my postdoc, and you really can't get any useful signals
from it. There is another company similar to this one - NeuroSky, google it -
and they're just as bad. The technology for reliably obtaining differentiable
neural signals using non-glue/screw electrodes is just not ready for
production yet.

~~~
daeken
It's definitely not research-quality (as I initially thought it might be), but
there are still some cool things you can do with it. One interesting
possibility is tying it into Max/Msp -- there's been some work along that
front lately.

------
r0s
From what I understand reading about this a few years ago: EEG with this kind
of external equipment can't read more than one strong impulse signal at a
time(that would be a simple detection, binary on or off), and certainly can't
locate signal origin.

So all the peripheral sensors detecting facial muscle movement do the real
work. Seems pretty dishonest to claim brain interface.

Am I misinformed? We're all waiting for this technology to develop, that
creates a big opportunity for misdirection.

~~~
convulsive
That's not entirely true -- there are some applications of the Epoc that can
actually perform detections which cannot solely be attributed to facial muscle
movement. [1] Of course, the signal-to-noise ratio is much lower than that of
research-grade devices, so a lot of preprocessing is required.

[1] NeuroPhone is an example: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc82Z_yfEwc>.
Here's a peer-reviewed article describing the preprocessing involved:
<http://sensorlab.cs.dartmouth.edu/pubs/neurophone.pdf>

~~~
r0s
> The Dial Tim application works on similar principles to P300-spellerbrain-
> computer interfaces: the phone ﬂashes a sequence of photos of contacts from
> the address book and a P300 neural signal is elicited when the ﬂashed photo
> matches the person whom the user wishes to dial.

This is just as I've said above, _one_ brain signal is used over time.

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FrojoS
Thanks for all the posts, that point out, that the technology is still
unreliable.

But com'on people, this is exciting! Who knows what great ideas might come out
of this, now, that there is an affordable, commercial product. Ideas are made
out of ideas. And so are applications made out of applications.

I wonder if playing games like "Spirit Mountain Demo Game" can change your
mental awareness and maybe even concentration abilities.

------
kanzure
and here's some software: <https://github.com/qdot/emokit/>

~~~
daeken
While I'm glad to see Emokit getting attention, this repo should no longer be
used. As I mentioned in [http://daeken.com/emokit-hacking-the-emotiv-epoc-
brain-compu...](http://daeken.com/emokit-hacking-the-emotiv-epoc-brain-
computer-0) , the new repo is <https://github.com/qdot/emokit/> as I've handed
maintainership over to qdot.

Edit: Repo in the parent was previously pointing to my original, unmaintained
library. This comment no longer makes sense :)

~~~
Estragon
You might want to note this in the README of that repository, and maybe update
the tag-line description at the top of the github page. (I assume it's this
one <https://github.com/daeken/Emokit>)

~~~
daeken
Yeah, I've been planning to but have been totally swamped. I should probably
do that tonight.

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troymc
Another player to watch in this space is NeuroVigil. Right now they're mainly
focused on EEG for healthcare applications, but their technology could be
modified for other use cases.

<http://www.neurovigil.com/>

------
convulsive
Streaming EEG using websockets and the emokit library (just POC, rate is very
low so all data are essentially noise):
<http://makemyactionschainreactions.net/eeg/>

~~~
daeken
Woah, awesome! I know it's just a POC, but it's great to see people using
Emokit -- I'm disappointed that I didn't have enough time to dedicate to doing
anything with it when I started it. Let me know if you run into any issues.

~~~
convulsive
Thanks! I also did some basic rhythm detection:
[https://github.com/agermanidis/emokit/blob/master/python/uti...](https://github.com/agermanidis/emokit/blob/master/python/utils/rhythms.py),
and added a simulation option so folks that want to contribute to the library
but don't actually have it (I suspect that there are exactly zero of them, but
anyway) can still test it on sample data.

~~~
daeken
Oh very cool -- I wrote some super basic stuff for this, but it didn't work
well at all, and I never had any time to improve it. Is your stuff merged into
the qdot branch yet? If not, you should definitely send a pull request, as I
think it'd work well with what he's been working on.

------
brown
Interesting TED talk by Emotiv founder:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/tan_le_a_headset_that_reads_your_br...](http://www.ted.com/talks/tan_le_a_headset_that_reads_your_brainwaves.html)

