As part of the junior year ciriculum of Biomedical Engineering students at the University of South Carolina, students are required to create their own research project revolving around EEG, EMG, ECG, or EOG data. Students were allowed to attempt to answer any research question they wanted as long as it utilized this data.
My group attempting to answer which genre of mobile video game required more concentration by collecting EEG beta wave data.
Three types of video games were studied in this experiment were of horror, arcade, and first person shooter types. The amplitude and frequency of beta waves were collected for each game type. The horror game genre was found to have the highest amplitude of beta waves of all the genres which could correlate to a higher degree of concentration with more research.
Relaxed EEG data was taken for the subject as a control to compare the games to. The subject was then recorded playing Granny, Subway Surfers, and Call of Duty to represent the horror, arcade, and first person shooter genres respectively. Data analysis and a FFT ( Fast Fourier Transform) was conducted in Microsoft Excel to yield the results of the experiment.
| Skills Demonstrated | Project Artifacts |
|---|---|
| EEG Data Collecting | See Below |
| Data Analysis | See Below |
| Technical Writing | Full Lab Report |
EEG data is incredibly interesting to experiment with as humanity has much to learn about the brain. Many people claim video games are degenerative to ones mental capacity but further experimentation with gaming and EEG data may prove that games with high levels of required focus, such as horror games, can actually be mentally stimulating. Besides the benefit to humanity, EEG data is just really cool to look collect and analyze.