Wearable brain scanner senses when you're overworked

Office workers in the future may be wearing this at the workplace: a wearable brain scanner that lets computers detect work overload and accordingly adjust their burden.

 

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Tufts University are experimenting with a way for computers to sense such anxiety or work overload in humans.

 

"Their system, called Brainput, is designed to recognize when a person's workload is excessive and then automatically modify a computer interface to make it easier. The researchers used a lightweight, portable brain monitoring technology, called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), that determines when a person is multitasking," the MIT Technology Review said.

 

An analysis of the brain scan data was then fed into a system that adjusted the user's workload at those times.

 

It can potentially "learn" to "give you a break," Technology Review added.

 

Technology Review said other ways a computer can detect mental overload includes logging errors in typing or speed of keystrokes.

 

Also, it could use computer vision to detect facial expressions.

 

"Brainput tries to get to closer to the source, by looking directly at brain activity," said Erin Treacy Solovey, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT.

 

Solovey presented the results at the Computer Human Interaction Conference in Austin, Texas.

 

For an experiment, Solovey and her team incorporated Brainput into virtual robots designed to adapt to the mental state of their human controller.

 

The main goal was for each operator, capped with fNIRS headgear, to guide two different robots through a maze to find a location where a Wi-Fi signal was strong enough to send a message.

 

But making the task hard was that the drivers had to constantly switch between the two robots, trying to keep track of both their locations and keep them from crashing into walls.

 

When the research subjects drove their robots toward the strongest Wi-Fi signal, their fNIRS sensors transmitted information about their mental state to the robots.

 

The robots were programmed to focus on a state of mind called branching, where a person is simultaneously working on two goals that require attention.

 

When the robots sensed that the driver was branching, they took on more of the navigation themselves.

 

"The researchers found that when the robots' autonomous mode kicked in, the overall performance of the human-robot team improved. The drivers didn't seem to notice or get frustrated by the autonomous behavior of the robot when they were multitasking," Technology Review said.

 

"A good chunk of computer and human-computing interaction research these days is focused on giving computers better senses so they can either implicitly or explicitly augment our intellect and assist with our tasks," said Desney Tan, a researcher at Microsoft Research.

 

Tan added this work is a wonderful first step toward "understanding our changing mental state and designing interfaces that dynamically tailor themselves so that the human-computer system can be as effective as possible."

 

Potential uses

 

Solovey suggested that such a system could potentially be used to help drivers, pilots, and supervisors of unmanned aerial vehicles.

 

Future work will investigate other cognitive states that can be reliably measured using fNIRS, she added. — TJD, GMA News