Brain Wave Controllers

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jonny5ive
 
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Joined: Mon Jul 22, 2013 2:54 pm

Brain Wave Controllers

Post by jonny5ive »

Adafruit should sell a quality EEG input device that senses your brain waves and translates them into an electrical output. Think about what you could do with this:

1) Write a Python script on a Raspberry Pi connected to the that translates the device's output into audible sound. Over time, your brain would probably learn what sound gets made when it thinks a certain way. With some practice and control, you can now play music straight off your dome. And can you do it with video as well? Boom, you just invented the Visi-Sonor from the Foundation books.
2) Walk around all day with the sensor somewhere on your head, picking up brainwave readings and sending it to the Arduino datalogger in your pocket. Every now and then the logger asks you a question and records the answer, like: "What's your mood?" "Rate your concentration (1-5)" "How hungry are you? (1-5)" "Think of the best meal you ate last week", and so on. When you've got enough data, train an algorithm that maps your brainwave raw input to your logged responses. You've now hacked your own brain and can use the result for health & therapy purposes.
3) Make a game out of it: identify four different brainwave patterns of sort that you're able to consciously control, map them to up/down/left/right arrows, and play Pac-Man with your mind. Or even simpler, just start with "up/down" and play Pong.
4) Brainwave locks. To open up a secure lock, you have to supply the correct brainwave sequence (like in the atmosphere plant on Mars in Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars)
5) Mechatronics control. If you could get good enough at this to control a mechanical arm or something, those who have lost the use of their limbs can now gain back some of that functionality. When you're in your spaceship, doing a hard burn that's so powerful you can't lift your arm to shut off the engine, you're still OK because you can send a shutdown instruction to the ship using your brain. Fighter pilots can do even harder-core maneuvers and still control their aircraft.

And so on.

Thing is, the tech has been around for some time, like the Force Trainer which used dry EEG tech in a Star Wars toy:
star-wars-force-trainer-2.jpg
star-wars-force-trainer-2.jpg (158.96 KiB) Viewed 110 times
This has already been looked at by other OpenBCI which makes the high end version of this stuff for researchers, but it's not really tinker- or maker-level. But honestly how hard is it really to just make an electrode that logs an EEG signal to a microcontroller? It's just a couple wires and some signal processing. Adafruit could sell a kit for $500 that is not as good -- but is 85% as good -- as the one OpenBCI sells for $3,000. And OpenBCI would probably thank Adafruit for doing so because it'd increase the number of people willing to spring for the high-end stuff now that they've got their feet wet.

I mean idk. I prolly drank too much caffeine this morning

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adafruit_support_bill
 
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Re: Brain Wave Controllers

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

Thank you for the suggestion. I will forward that to the design team.

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