EEG

intro

Regularly students discover EEG brain sensors. These sensors are very attractive!

And the price is between 100 and 1000 euro's.

You should certainly use it and experiment with it. Depending on your goal it might work.

Goals for which the EEG brain device in your project could work:

investigating devices which might work in the future
speculative design, where you suggest possible application

Goals for which the EEG brain device doesn't work:

measuring emotions with accuracy and showing these "real" measured emotions in some way
steering your car with your brain device

Student projects

Jasna Rokegem (Fashion Design) was one of the first students graduating with a "Fashion on brainwaves" project. She founded her own company on this idea after graduating. She exploits the "speculative" goal.

For her graduation she made these outfits.

an outfit with a collar rising and lowering, depending on stress level.
an outfit changing between a female and a male silhouet
an outfit which shows "emotions" as color patterns on the back

devices

possible goals

Emotion measurement One goal students like is the measurement of "emotions". The idea of having emotions seems so simple. Say ... Happiness, isn't that simple? No! There has been an debate over centuries what it exactly is this "happiness". Many good texts about "happiness" if you are interested, take a bit of time reading these texts...say 20 years?

So what is happiness, is difficult. But this EEG device just "measures"? So it must be clear? No, because the EEG device produces "numbers", many numbers every second. Somebody - a person, like you and me - has to program an algorithm which interpreted these data, and tells you: this is happiness. If the literature indicates how wide the ideas of happiness differ, then how for this programming person to "know" what numbers represent "happiness"?

Steering devices with brain waves This seems more straightforward. You could use pattern recognition. Then you avoid the problem of "what is happiness". Using AI for getting it right, without understanding the underlying principle. Even then. For AI to work, you need thousands of times telling the device this was right, this was left. And every person has a slightly different "brain"...

Driving a car with your brain There is a study about the "steering" possibilities. Rather devastating for the idea that you can drive a car with your brain waves. Even if the accuracy was 90%, then there would be many more accidents as we now have. Strange idea by the way, because ... what is the difference, don't we use our brain also for avoiding accidents? The difference is again: interpretation by algorithms. In the case of EEG brain waves driving the car, there is a person - programmer, in between us and the car.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4806709/

research

scientific

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4806709/

consumer comparison

http://learn.neurotechedu.com/headsets/

significant experiments

Although not one of the devices above mentioned, Arnon Grunberg, one of the well known Dutch writers did an interesting experiment, wiring himself to a headset with many electrodes. The goal was to record his emotions while writing and then compare the measurements of his emotions with the measurements of the readers of his text. This experiment failed because the researchers could not find "his" emotions while writing. The explanation was that - probably - writing is rational, and not emotional.