Measuring Brainwaves and Monitoring Behavior by Nikhil D.

How can an application that measures emitted brain waves give feedback based on a person’s behavior? Brainwaves are vibrations emitted from the brain when neurons communicate with each other. When we are tired, slow, sleeping, or dreaming, we are emitting oscillations with low frequencies. When we are awake or alert, we emit oscillations with higher frequencies. Modern-day scientists use a device called an Electroencephalography (EEG) to measure these brain waves. By creating an application that uses the data from an EEG and creates graphs for the user to see, there are an endless amount of possibilities... There are several types of brain waves, and each type of wave is used in different circumstances. When we are tired, slow, sleeping, or dreaming, we are emitting oscillations with low frequencies. When we are awake or alert, we emit oscillations with higher frequencies. According to Brainworks Neurotherapy, the different types of brain waves can be categorized according to their frequencies into four groups: delta (.5 to 3 Hz), theta (3 to 8 Hz), alpha (8 to 12 Hz), beta (12 to 38 Hz), and gamma waves (38 to 42 Hz)... The device that I will be using to measure brain waves is the Emotiv EPOC. According to Emotive EPOC Product Specifications, the device is a scientific contextual wireless EEG system that has 14 EEG channels and 2 references. Using this device, I will be able to receive brain wave data from the Emotiv which can then be parsed through the server...The first step of the research will be to establish a way to attain access to the raw stream data from the Emotiv EPOC headset. For this task, I will be using “EmoKit” (https://github.com/openyou/emokit), which is an open source driver created by the OpenYou Organization. Next, I will need to create a mechanism that can parse the data received from the Emotiv to the server. For this I will use Node.js, which is a Javascript Runtime for developing server-side web applications. With Node.js I will be able to receive data on any device, whether it is a browser on a computer, or an app on an iPhone... After the Emotiv data is synchronized on another device, the data can then be used to construct a graph for the front-end user to visualize.