Mental State Recognition via Wearable EEG

The increasing quality and affordability of consumer electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets make them attractive for situations where medical grade devices are impractical. Predicting and tracking cognitive states is possible for tasks that were previously not conducive to EEG monitoring. For instance, monitoring operators for states inappropriate to the task (e.g. drowsy drivers), tracking mental health (e.g. anxiety) and productivity (e.g. tiredness) are among possible applications for the technology. Consumer grade EEG headsets are affordable and relatively easy to use, but they lack the resolution and quality of signal that can be achieved using medical grade EEG devices. Thus, the key questions remain: to what extent are wearable EEG devices capable of mental state recognition, and what kind of mental states can be accurately recognized with these devices? In this work, we examined responses to two different types of input: instructional (‘logical’) versus recreational (‘emotional‘) videos, using a range of machine-learning methods. We tried SVMs, sparse logistic regression, and Deep Belief Networks, to discriminate between the states of mind induced by different types of video input, that can be roughly labeled as ‘logical’ vs. ‘emotional’. Our results demonstrate a significant potential of wearable EEG devices in differentiating cognitive states between situations with large contextual but subtle apparent differences.