EEG-based serious game for pain management

Abstract

Nowadays, many people have been suffered from different types of pain due to various reasons and medical practitioners have been exploring different methods to help people manage their pain. Electroencephalogram (EEG) based neurofeedback training has been proved to be one of the effective methods. However, its existing applications lack of more interesting visual and acoustical elements; Also, none of the existing serious games for pain management have integrated EEG signals.

In this Final Year Project, the EEG based emotion and concentration level recognition algorithms were revised to be integrated together and a 3D first person shooting game was designed and built to help players reduce their pain perceptions by distracting them from their pain. Players’ real-time emotions and concentration levels can be detected and feed backed to them using lifelike visual elements inside the game, at the same time, their brain states can also be influenced by changes of the lighting colors. Additionally the game difficulty level changes according to players’ brain states. At the end of the game, players’ emotion and concentration scores will be logged and output to the screen. In order to realize the game design, Autodesk Maya 2011 was used to model the shooting target inside the game. Then, Unreal Development Kits was used to build the maps of the game. After that, Unreal Kismet was used to control the game flow and the animations and movements of the objects in the game. Finally, the game was connected to EEG system to realize the real-time brain state recognition.