Empirical Evaluation of the Emotiv EPOC BCI Headset for the Detection of Mental Actions

Abstract

This study evaluated the detection accuracy of one of the first brain-computer interfaces intended for personal use by normal, healthy users: the Emotiv EPOC. This system allows the user to directly interact with computer software through thoughts alone. The system was evaluated on its ability to accurately detect and classify six sets of paired mental actions over three evaluation phases. Results found the system to perform significantly better than chance for all mental actions, and improve over time with additional training data. The system detected all actions with equivalent accuracy. Additional investigation of individual differences revealed that a user’s gender, age, handedness, attentional control, vividness of visual imagery, and mental rotation ability all had no bearing on the detection accuracy of the system. These results indicate the Emotiv EPOC system performs its function as a brain-computer interface with an acceptable level of accuracy, yielding many new possibilities for human-computer interaction.

Evaluación de las emociones de usuarios en tareas con realimentación háptica utilizado el dispositivo Emotiv Insight

“…1). A pesar de ser dispositivos de relativo bajo costo, los dispositivos Emotiv registran la actividad cerebral para la detección de diversas acciones mentales con éxito [3], [4]. El dispositivo Emotiv provee, además de las señales cerebrales medidas directamente de los sensores, seis medidas básicas de desempeño mental estimadas directamente a partir de la actividad cerebral: Compromiso (Engagement), Interés (Interest), Excitación (Excitement), Enfoque (Focus), Estrés (Stress) y Relajación (Relaxation).…”

Triggering Insight: Using Neuroscience to Understand How Priming Changes Individual Cognition during Electronic Brainstorming

“…The Emotiv system is a low-density electrode EEG device that collects a veracious signal of underlying cortical activity, and has been used in prior studies published in leading business journals (Minas, Potter, Dennis, Bartelt, & Bae, 2014). Many studies have scrutinized the Emotiv device in a variety of settings such as examining working memory (Wang, Gwizdka, & Chaovalitwongse, 2016), auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) (Badcock et al, 2013), mobile brain-computer interfaces (Debener, Minow, Emkes, Gandras, & Vos, 2012), reliable detection of the P-300 wave and other ERPs (Ramírez-Cortes, Alarcon-Aquino, Rosas-Cholula, Gomez-Gil, & Escamilla-Ambrosio, 2010;Wang et al, 2016), human-computer interaction research (Taylor & Schmidt, 2012), hemispheric asymmetry (Friedman, Shapira, Jacobson, & Gruberger, 2015), among others. These studies have found Emotiv obtains a reliable and valid signal of underlying cortical activity and has been shown to be as good as larger high-density systems.…”

Deep learning approaches for human activity recognition using wearable technology

“…Textile ECG electrodes are placed on the thorax, and textile piezoresistive sensor (breathing sensor) is placed above them in the middle (9). Emotiv EPOC® neuroheadset is a wearable 14-channel EEG system, validated as brain computer interface (BCI) device (10,11), used in the research of event-related potential (ERP) studies (12,13) and emotion recognition experiments (14,15). Myo armband® is a hand gesture controller that integrates eight segments with electromyography (EMG) sensors (each segment includes one EMG amplifier with bar electrodes), and one segment additionally includes a three-axis accelerometer and a three-axis gyroscope (16).…”