Brain-De-Fer A Brain-Computer Interface Game for Mind Contest

In this paper “Brain-de-fer” is presented, which is a game where two players compete against each other using their attention in a “bras-de-fer” match. A brain-computer interface is implemented to allow the players to play based on their attention. Two different EEG devices were tested for this application, the Muse S headband and the Mindwave mobile. To quantify the attention value from the raw EEG values, five classifiers were trained and tested.

I. Introduction

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) is a continuously evolving area, that already demonstrates profound impact on various aspects of society and human experience. Using a BCI a user can control mechanical or electrical devices without using their nerve system or generally any movement. In the field of Biomedicine, BCI enables the study of the brain activity. Some capabilities of this technology include prediction of epilepsy episodes [1], enabling paralyzed people to control the movement of their wheelchair [2] or (like in this case) create games that are both fun to play and help cope with diseases like Adolescent Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or dementia. For such an interface to work correctly, amongst other systems, there must be signal processing and filtering systems that can correctly distinguish between voluntary actions and noise that seems like an action (involuntary). For that reason, there has been developed a pipeline that should be followed when designing such an interface. The main components of the pipeline are [3]: •

Signal acquisition

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Feature extraction

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Feature translation

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Device output