After my DOW Health research on the EEG, I decided that I was interested to discover more about how EEG works. I had discovered some other installation/artworks apart from Mind Pilot which make use of EEG. One of them is Eunoia II by Lisa Park, in which the artist makes use of EEG to control pools of water:

My Idea:

I decided to do something which is more design based which can solve some real world problems. Something which I researched on that EEG can be very useful for is in helping people with obtaining a state of mental relaxation, as it is able to detect whether a person is in a relaxed state of mind or not.

My idea is to create an ambient light which is used for meditation purposes in order to set the mood for someone to relax. According to my research, the colour of ambient light affects the emotional state of a person and hence can be a useful tool in meditation practices. Different colour lights can be adjusted according to the state of mind of the user, whether they are in a meditative state or not. I am also looking into whether the changing of the colour of lights can be triggered manually by blinking fast a certain number of times.

Medium: Arduino and EEG

I have rented an EEG from the film store and started playing with it. LP is right about it in the aspect that it does have certain limitation, for example since it is paired with bluetooth and my phone the connection at times does not work too well. How is works is that is allegedly measures 3 things, namely Attention, Meditation and Blinking. From my own experience I find that the blinking sensor works well and accurately when the device is connected, so perhaps that is the most reliable form of input. For attention and meditation it is measured on a scale of 0-100 and it seems to spike and ebb pretty randomly so I will have to explore further on whether it is really accurately sense attention and meditative state.

To connect the EEG to Arduino is possible, and I have 2 potential methods. The first which I intended to use is to connect the wires from Arduino directly to the EEG but this is not ideal since it’s a borrowed EEG.

Another method which I will try is to use a Bluetooth Module to connect it to Arduino. Since the EEG that I am currently using is Bluetooth connected, and I have been pairing it with my smartphone to use it so far, if I can connect it to Arduino interface through Bluetooth that would save me a lot of time. The Bluetooth Module for Arduino is not pricey and there are tutorials available online so I will do some more research to determine which is the best way to do this!