Week Three - Day One

The headset came in Monday, today being Tuesday. Getting a good signal was difficult and required some effort of putting more saline solution on the electrodes and weaving through masses of hair. Although once the signal turned green (meaning good signal), then we could mess around with the Expressiv, Affectiv, and Cognitiv Suite. 

The Expressiv Suite displayed the robot face mimicking our facial expressions and we could train expressions such as smiling and raising an eyebrow. 

The Affectiv Suite displayed the signals of our emotions. Once the user was frustrated, the frustrated signal would shoot up to the top of the chart. The signals would oscillate as well to show that it's all displaying in real time. We tried calming down to increase the meditation signal and decreasing the frustrated emotion. 

The Cognitiv Suite was where we spent most of the time. We found that training the neutral was most difficult than we imagined because we couldn't think about anything and had to stay calm. Although once you learn an action to use on the displayed cube, returning to the neutral state became difficult because you would get too involved or immersed into the action and therefore, stepping away and relaxing helps reduce the mind of mental fatigue. Once the user starts adding more actions (only up to 4 actions at a time), the difficult increases to a cap of "Expert Only!" showing that the more actions you try to think at once, the harder it is to control one specific action. The mind gets jumbled up in all the thoughts and making distinct actions isn't easy to control.
The skill rating bar on the side displays the percentage of that action. The skill rating shows how consistently one focuses on the mental thought during training to determine the level of focus and concentration.

Now, I must work on an analysis of the data using Python as another project. The goal is to take all the different signals from the 14 - 16 electrodes while the user, who is wearing the Emotiv EPOC headset, is reading or playing a game, to determine what the action is. To do this, I will be studying parts of Fourier Analysis to understand how to deduce those signals into a simpler reading.