FOCUS

The challenge

Learning is highly inidividual - we all have our own pace, but most of the time, we all have to study the same material in the same way, leading to boredom and frustration. When students are not engaged in what they're learning because it doesn't match their rhythm, they lose focus and waste time with inattentive studying, which has minimal results both in terms of academic performance and skills obtained.

The solution

We will develop an innovative brain-computer interface based learning system which includes a wireless EEG headset, a smartphone application and optionally, a smart watch (a Fitbit for your brain!) Based on the EEG data, we calculate an engagement index, which estimates whether the student is in a good workflow state and whether they are keeping up with the material being presented to them. Informed by this, we can now prompt users to re-engage their attention or repeat sections of material as needed, provide both live and long-term metrics in a visual form to enable self-monitoring of attention, and suggest an optimal break/study rhythm - all to optimize learning and give students full control of their brain and academic success. We are confident that we can develop the product - in fact, we have a live prototype running (https://focus-brainihacks.herokuapp.com/) and what we have developed so far has won several awards: 3rd place at the BR41N.IO hackathon (g.tec), 2nd place at the Brabathon (Philips). The science behind our project has also been submitted to the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics.