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Back in October I wrote about playing Mind Ball, a game that measure players' brain waves to control a ball's movement across the game table. Well, at this year's CES, Mattel announced that they are releasing a game called MindFlex that works on the same biofeedback general principles.

MindFlex uses an EEG headband to measure your brain waves. Based on its readings, a jet of air lowers or raises a ball in mid-air, and you use a knob to rotate the ball through an obstacle course.

Mind Ball had impressed me so much that I had begun investigated EEG devices for the home last year. I came across the OpenEEG project on SourceForge and put together a basic getting-started-level shopping list. My initial estimate was about $200, almost all of which was hardware related.

Now I'm thinking that rather than building my own biofeedback device, I might wait for the MindFlex to come out. I don't know how hackable it will be right out of the box, but you can bet that I won't be the only one voiding the warranty on this thing.

MindFlex will be available for around $80 this fall. See the demo below.

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Comments

Jeff E Mandel MD MS
May 24, 2009 at 3:17 AM

I'd look for used Aspect BIS monitors. The serial output is very easy to work with, and all of the "heavy lifting" on signal processing is done for you. Mind Ball is adapted from an earlier project by called BIS Ball, which used the BIS to quantitate relaxation. Having said this (and having a BIS at my disposal), I'll probably get a Midflex to see if I can quantitate residual sedation following sedation. At $99, I can buy a dozen for what a used BIS costs. A nice adjunct to my Wii Balance Board. If you decide you want to play with raw EEG, it is tricky in the region of total wakefulness, as EMG artifact can swamp you. A good algorithm to play with is approximate entropy. What you are looking for is the complexity of the signal. Awake EEG is like a noisy crowd; relaxed EEG becomes more like a church choir. The total decibel level may be identical; it is the order vs. randomness that changes. Jeff E Mandel MD MS Clinical Associate Professor of Anesthesiology University of Pennsylvania