Rohan’s Status Report for 2/17

This week I spent time understanding how to improve the contact quality of the EEG headset. I set the headset up on myself and spent some time making adjustments, finally reaching 100% contact quality. I met with Justin, who is one of the piano players who Professor Dueck trains to teach him how to wear the headset and introduce him to the EmotivPRO software. I have also continued to research methods for detecting focus via EEG including training an SVM or CNN on EEG frequency bands delta, theta, and alpha which correspond closely to attention. We learned that EmotivPRO comes with detection of attention, interest, cognitive stress, and other brain states already in the form of a numerical performance metric. We are thinking of doing some further processing on these numbers to show a user a binary indicator of whether they are focused or not as well as providing the user with insight as to what factors are playing a role in their focus levels. My progress is on schedule, but I am waiting for purchase of the EmotivPRO subscription which will enable me to begin prototyping something with the EEG data from the headset which is currently blocking me. I will follow up with the ECE inventory/purchasing team to ensure that this does not become an issue given our schedule. In the next week, I hope to set up the EEG focus state data labeling system for Professor Dueck and begin researching/computing correlation metrics between various performance metrics.