The prevalence of online learning poses a vital challenge in real-time monitoring of students' concentration. Traditional methods such as questionnaire assessments require manual intervention, and webcam-based monitoring fails to provide accurate insights about learners' mental focus as it is deceived by mere screen fixation without cognitive engagement. Existing BCI-based approaches lack real-time validation and evaluation procedures. To address these limitations, a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) system is developed using a non-invasive Electroencephalogram (EEG) headband, FocusCalm, to record brainwave activity under attentive and non-attentive states. 20 minutes of data were collected from each of 20 participants watching a pre-recorded educational video. The data validation employed a novel intra-video questionnaire assessment. Subsequently, collected signals were segmented (sliding window), filtered (Butterworth bandpass), and cleaned (removal of high-amplitude and EOG artifacts such as eye blinks). Time, frequency, wavelet, and statistical features were extracted, followed by recursive feature elimination (RFE) with support vector machines (SVMs) to classify attention and non-attention states. The leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) cross-validation accuracy was found to be 88.77%. The system provides feedback alerts upon detection of a non-attention state and maintains focus profile logs. A pilot study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of real-time feedback. Five participants underwent a 10-minute session comprising a 5-minute baseline phase devoid of feedback, succeeded by a 5-minute feedback phase, during which alerts were activated if participants exhibited inattention for approximately 8 consecutive seconds. A paired t-test (t = 5.73, p = 0.007) indicated a statistically significant improvement in concentration during the feedback phase.

This study introduces a specialized pipeline designed to classify the concentration state of an individual student during online learning sessions by training a custom-tailored machine learning model. Detailed protocols for acquiring and preprocessing EEG data are outlined, along with the extraction of fifty statistical features from five EEG signal bands: alpha, beta, theta, delta, and gamma. Following feature extraction, a thorough feature selection process was conducted to optimize the data inputs for a personalized analysis. The study also explores the benefits of hyperparameter fine-tuning to enhance the classification accuracy of the student's concentration state. EEG signals were captured from the student using a Muse headband (Gen 2), equipped with five electrodes (TP9, AF7, AF8, TP10, and a reference electrode NZ), during engagement with educational content on computer-based e-learning platforms. Employing a random forest model customized to the student's data, we achieved remarkable classification performance, with test accuracies of 97.6% in the computer-based learning setting and 98% in the virtual reality setting. These results underscore the effectiveness of our approach in delivering personalized insights into student concentration during online educational activities.

An AI tech startup wants you to trade in regular dreams for a headband that lets you control your nighttime wanderings in a lucid dreamlike state. Prophetic is releasing the 2,000 Halo AI headband in 2025, which will give wearers unparalleled control over their dreams that could help users grapple with existing problems they're facing in their waking lives. The headband uses electroencephalography (EEG), which records electrical activity in the brain, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) which measures brain activity by measuring the blood flow. However, experts aren't yet sure what the long-term effects could be and warn that using high-frequency sounds to zap your brain, could hinder our cognitive ability to process short-term memories. 'We are very rarely lucid in our dreams.

From sex toys to creepy AI talking heads, the CES tech show never fails to disappoint in terms of novel gadgets. This year, electronics giants like LG and Samsung focused a lot on their transparent TV screens and their futuristic tech for cars, but out on the show floor, there was a heavy focus on home cooking, health, and pets. Here are the 13 most interesting and surprisingly useful'world's firsts' that we saw: Dogsplay is a TV made specifically for dogs. 'Dogs are lonely when they're home alone,' a representative for the company Dogsplay told DailyMail.com. Many dog owners switch on the TV for their animal to watch while they're gone. Dogsplay has made a TV just for dogs that plays content with adjusted color to compensate for dogs' red-green colorblindness, and adjusted sound to account for the higher-frequencies they can hear.

We introduce Dreamento (Dream engineering toolbox), an open-source Python package for dream engineering using sleep electroencephalography (EEG) wearables. Dreamento main functions are (1) real-time recording, monitoring, analysis, and sensory stimulation, and (2) offline post-processing of the resulting data, both in a graphical user interface (GUI). In real-time, Dreamento is capable of (1) data recording, visualization, and navigation, (2) power-spectrum analysis, (3) automatic sleep scoring, (4) sensory stimulation (visual, auditory, tactile), (5) establishing text-to-speech communication, and (6) managing annotations of automatic and manual events. The offline functions aid in post-processing the acquired data with features to reformat the wearable data and integrate it with non-wearable recorded modalities such as electromyography (EMG). While Dreamento was primarily developed for (lucid) dreaming studies, its applications can be extended to other areas of sleep research such as closed-loop auditory stimulation and targeted memory reactivation.

We hope Alexa, Siri, and Echo are doing well. Research shows that feeding fish only once a day is not sufficient, but that is your choice. We love to read your writing. Your choose-your-own-adventure stories are almost worthy of a compliment from a twelve-year-old. Your cello music is impressive.

The rumors were (mostly) true. Sony did indeed have a follow-up to its stellar WH-1000XM4 ready for a proper debut. Today the company announced the WH-1000XM5 ($400), its latest flagship noise-canceling headphones equipped with all of the things we've come to expect from Sony's 1000X line. This time around the company gave its premium cans a big exterior redesign. In the process, it massively increased comfort while also expanding the incredible performance in terms of noise cancelation and overall sound quality.

Zeit Medical, which makes an early warning system for strokes during sleep, has raised $2M in a seed round just after leaving Y Combinator's Summer 2021 cohort. The company's work suggests the brain-monitoring headband could save lives by alerting people to possible strokes hours before they might otherwise be noticed, and the new funding will help propel them towards commercial availability. The company's device is a soft headband with a lightweight electroencephalogram (EEG) in it. It works with a smartphone app to analyze brain activity and, using a machine learning model trained by human experts, watch for signs of an impending stroke. I wrote up Zeit's system in detail in August, and little has changed since then, though co-founder and CEO (and now Ferolyn fellow) Orestis Vardoulis noted that a usage study found that people wore the headband on 90 percent of nights, including people using CPAP machines, and there were few complaints about fit or comfort.

Imagine if you could control a robot or play a video game using your mind alone. It sounds like sci-fi, but this is exactly what brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) are already being used for. With applications from entertainment to medicine, BMIs are set to change the world of technology as we know it. But what exactly are they? And how do they work?

Active Noise Cancelling (ANC) headphones are a modern marvel with one major drawback: Many will unintentionally wipe out some of the frequencies present in the music you're listening to. Yamaha says its $299 YH-E700A ANC headphone delivers nearly identical sound whether its active noise cancellation is on, off, or in transparency mode. I'd say Yamaha has at least come closer to that goal than any other headphone I've reviewed, and that should make an extremely appealing set of cans for those who eschew active noise cancellation because they feel the technology has an adverse impact on musical recordings. That said, the YH-E700A aren't without a few other wrinkles that Yamaha will hopefully iron out via future firmware updates. The Yamaha YH-E700A adds several features you won't find in its less-expensive noise-cancelling stablemate, the YH-E500 ($179.95):