Modeling and analysis tools for brain study

Abstract

The main objective of this project is to understand more about the brain activities, and then from that we try to develop a program to assess and keep track of the brain performance. In the particular, Electroencephalography (EEG) has been used to monitor the brain activities of the subjects during the assessments. The EEG was chosen among other techniques because it is a reliable, accurate and popular method which has used widely for decades. Moreover, in our lab we are using a device called Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset; this device can connect to the computer through wireless and provide a high-resolution EEG data. Therefore, this device was mainly used in this project to develop EEG-based applications. This project consists of two sub-projects. In the first sub-project, a 3D visualization tool for observing brain activities was integrated into an open-sourced project called BrainBay. The 3D visualization tool gets the EEG data from Emotiv device directly and then represents it as Blobby on a 3D head. Initially, these two programs run independently, so the task now is to merge them together into a single project. For the second sub-project, an EEG-enable test was developed to assess the vigilant attention level of the subject. The purpose of this test is to check whether the attention ability of the subject is improved after going through neurofeedback training.