Nowadays, almost every aspect of our society has a connection with technology. Gadgets are used in every field of science and social interaction. In the field of medical science, technology has always been very important for serious, physical injuries. However, technology has been used very little when it comes to mental “injuries”. While the need for improvement in this field is ever increasing, scientists have not been creative enough in thinking of new ways to help people. They are stuck in their way of treatment by drugs, which always have negative side-effects on the body. We now propose to use technology, in our case a game, to alter mental states instead of using chemical substances.

Our idea is to create a game in which we can change the mood of the user from a negative state to a positive state through several stimuli. This game will be easy and fun to use, which is an advantage when dealing, for example, with children. We think this approach could be very useful to help with child-depression or young children with ADHD or other concentration or aggression problems because it is hard to talk to small children. A game like this could also be useful for adolescents or adults who suffer from depression, stress or anxiety problems because it would help them come into a more relaxed and happy state.

Research question:

Is it possible to stepwise adjust the state of mind of a person by EEG-based neurofeedback? For example we want to find out if it is possible to stepwise transform irritation into calmness or excitement. We expect to be able to indicate emotions and transform them through several kinds of stimuli. The stimuli could for example entail sound, pictures and short videos.

It might be interesting to see if we could use our research results in future games.

 The final report of our group can be see here:

 http://staff.science.uva.nl/~ghebreab/ICC2010/SemanticHeroes.pdf

 The final presentation is included in the attachment below