How do you rate Emotiv EPOC?

[ilja.kuzovkin]

Hi Everyone.

I recently became interested in BCI-field, and now have some ideas to try.
And to do so I have to get an BCI device first.

What can you say about Emotiv EPOC, is seems not very expensive and 14 electrodes are more promising than, for example, NeuroSky with only 1 electrode...
With the Emotiv's software we can only train in to recognize 4 "actions" + neutral.
I know there were attempts to run 2 instances of Emotiv soft simultaneously, which gave 8 "actions" and worked fine.

If I'll write my own software with some training algorithm, how far I will be able to go in this action-distinguishing?

[lbonnet]

Hi !

I have serious doubts on the performance of any BCI system once you want to discriminate more than 4 mental states. And this is not particularly relative to the Emotiv headset.

If their software is limited to 4 actions, I think this is not because the software can't do more. More than 4 mental states is anyway quite hard to discriminate nowadays with good accuracy.
For example if you are talking about motor imagery (thinking of moving the right/left hand for example),
- it brings tiredness
- it needs a lot of training even for 1 action

Moreover, how the user will integrate 8 actions ? How can he switch from one mental state to another ?
The idea of "mental state" is in my opinion too vague. You can relax, concentrate, thinking of movement... But for example I don't know any BCI that detects what word or idea you are thinking of.

I know there were attempts to run 2 instances of Emotiv soft simultaneously, which gave 8 "actions" and worked fine.

I am really interested in that attempts. Can you please give us some pointers about that ?

If I'll write my own software with some training algorithm, how far I will be able to go in this action-distinguishing?

I suggest you look at the current state-of-the-art in BCI, to know first what you can detect nowadays in the brain through EEG.
I am sure the community can benefit from new training algorithms, but first you must be sure of the real nature of the things you want to detect

Best regards !

Laurent

[ilja.kuzovkin]

Thank You for answer.

I am really interested in that attempts. Can you please give us some pointers about that ?

I got this information from Geoff Mackellar in private letter:
"There are limits to how many visualizations can be triggered at the same time – four alternatives plus NEUTRAL – although some other users got around this limitation by running multiple instances of the detection suites."

but first you must be sure of the real nature of the things you want to detect

Yeah, I suppose I do not well understand what I'm talking about
Can You recommend some articles?

[lbonnet]

I got this information from Geoff Mackellar in private letter:
"There are limits to how many visualizations can be triggered at the same time – four alternatives plus NEUTRAL – although some other users got around this limitation by running multiple instances of the detection suites."

Ok I see. I wanted to know if a user really managed to handle 8 mental actions

Can You recommend some articles?

Well... for a start I suggest you look at the website http://future-bnci.org. They give some useful pointers and articles.
You should search for P300 signals, Motor Imagery, ERD, Steady State Visual (Auditory, Somatosensorial) Evoked Potentials...

If anyone else has some useful article, be my guest

Hope this helps,

Laurent