Blog #26: Embodiment in brain-computer interaction

Embodiment in brain-computer interaction

Authors:  Kenton O’Hara, Abigail Sellen, and Richard Harper


Authors Bios :

• Kenton O’Hara is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and works in the Socio Digital Systems Group.
• Abigail Sellen is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and has a PhD from The University of California, San Diego where she studied under Don Norman.
• Richard Harper is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and has a PhD from Manchester.

Venue : This paper was presented at the CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems.


SUMMARY


Hypothesis: 
In the paper the authors explored Brain Computer Interaction (BCI) technology, in which they believe could be effectively and harnessed. By exploring BCI, the authors found that they could maximize the current effectiveness on current devices that use BCI. 


Methods:
16 participants were found for the study and were in 4 distinct social groups meaning they knew each other prior to the study. Each group was given a MindFlex game for one week, video recording every play session which was to be analyzed by the researchers once returned.  MindFlex is a commercially available product that measures a user's "focus" and uses that measurement to control a fan that can raise or lift a ball in the air. The more focus detected, the faster the fan blows, the higher the ball floats.


Results:
Participants were found to change their orientation in an attempt to change their level of concentration. Some people held their breath or came in closer to the ball as well. Other people lowered their concentration by not looking at the game. Another way for changing the level of concentration participants used was to imagine the ball moving up. The action of imagination caused more mental activity and caused the ball to move up.

Discussion/Conclusion:

The researchers found that BCI design needs to have physical and movement aspcets to the tools along with mental in order to improve appon BCI. 


Because of the aspects of the idea of using the brain to control things, will revolutionize the industry with products. Programing may become more easy if one could just think about something and on the screen it would implement. I don't know if the technology will ever come to that point, but it would be the day that programing may not be so difficult toe grasp.