Paper Reading #26: Embodiment in brain-computer interaction

Authors

Kenton O’Hara, Abigail Sellen, Richard Harper.

Occupation

Kenton O’Hara is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and works in the Socio Digital Systems Group.

Abigail Sellen is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and holds a PhD from The University of California, San Diego

Richard Harper is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and holds a PhD from Manchester.

Location

Presented at the CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems at NYC

 

Summary

Hypothesis

There is a need to better understand the potential for brain computer interaction. The study of the body interaction is important rather than just focusing on the brain itself

Methods

The experiment was based on using a game called mindflex. The game uses EEC technology to calculate electrical signals given off by the brain. The fan in the mindflex platform will begin to blow stronger as the brain activity increases. The like wise will happen if the activity in the brain decreases. The participants brought the game home for a week and played with it and recorded their gameplay. The videos were looked into by researchers to see physical behaviors. Examples included gestures, what they said, and bodily actions. The point of this was to see the nature of interactions and how they were used during game play.

Results

based on the observations it was seen that body position played a large role in this game. the users would tend to orient themselves based on what they would try to do. As expected their gestures and expressions tended to be more stiff when attempting to concentrate while their expressions relaxed quite a bit when not concentrating hard. 

Content

The paper focuses on the importance of understanding how the body as a whole interacts when accomplishing something that requires the brain to concentrate. The experiments are focused on looking into how people would behave and interact with this game called mindflex. The researchers were able to find behavioral patterns that were quite consistent.

Discussion

I thought that this whole research concept was pretty out of the box and was quite interesting to read about in general. Although this paper helps us realize that looking at body behavior is important even if we are only focusing on the concentration given out by the brain, i am still a bit unsure on what the information can be used to applied in. The only thing i can think of is a game that requires concentration while doing a certain task.