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Towards Serious Games for Improved BCI

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Handbook of Digital Games and Entertainment Technologies

Abstract

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies, or technologies that use online brain signal processing, have a great promise to improve human interactions with computers, their environment, and even other humans. Despite this promise, there are no current serious BCI technologies in widespread use, due to the lack of robustness in BCI technologies. The key neural aspect of this lack of robustness is human variability, which has two main components: (1) individual differences in neural signals and (2) intraindividual variability over time. In order to develop widespread BCI technologies, it will be necessary to address this lack of robustness. However, it is currently unknown how neural variability affects BCI performance. To accomplish these goals, it is essential to obtain data from large numbers of individuals using BCI technologies over considerable lengths of time. One promising method for this is through the use of BCI technologies embedded into games with a purpose (GWAP). GWAP are a game-based form of crowdsourcing which players choose to play for enjoyment and during which the player performs key tasks which cannot be automated but that are required to solve research questions. By embedding BCI paradigms in GWAP and recording neural and behavioral data, it should be possible to much more clearly understand the differences in neural signals between individuals and across different time scales, enabling the development of novel and increasingly robust adaptive BCI algorithms.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Translational Neuroscience Branch, U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Aberdeen, MD, USA

    Brent J. Lance, Jon Touryan, Amar Marathe & Kaleb McDowell

  2. Brain Research Center, National Chiao Tung University, 300, Hsinchu, Taiwan

    Yu-Kai Wang, Shao-Wei Lu, Chun-Hsiang Chuang & Chin-Teng Lin

  3. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Paul Sajda

  4. Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, University of California San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA

    Tzyy-Ping Jung

  5. Cognitive Sciences Branch, U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Aberdeen, MD, USA

    Peter Khooshabeh

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  1. Brent J. Lance
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  2. Jon Touryan
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  3. Yu-Kai Wang
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  4. Shao-Wei Lu
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  5. Chun-Hsiang Chuang
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  6. Peter Khooshabeh
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  7. Paul Sajda
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  8. Amar Marathe
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  9. Tzyy-Ping Jung
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  10. Chin-Teng Lin
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  11. Kaleb McDowell
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Correspondence to Brent J. Lance .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Design School, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

    Ryohei Nakatsu

  2. Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Matthias Rauterberg

  3. Dipto. Scienze dell'Informazione, Università di Bologna , Bologna, Italy

    Paolo Ciancarini

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Lance, B.J. et al. (2017). Towards Serious Games for Improved BCI. In: Nakatsu, R., Rauterberg, M., Ciancarini, P. (eds) Handbook of Digital Games and Entertainment Technologies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4560-50-4_4

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