Progress Report: 11/13/14 (Injecting Biofeedback into Different Fields)

Problem: We want to place our knowledge in Biofeedback in an industry more viable than video games.

Progress Report: This week we discovered that in order to record the data, we needed to download a third party application to export data EEG data to an excel file. With the application it is possible to directly record and export the raw data to an excel file through by writing code, but for the sake of time, we believe that it is most efficient to use an application to record the data.

http://store.neurosky.com/products/labview-drivers

Essentially, the third party application is not really an application but a series of driver that have a set of codes that that will be able to record and save raw EEG data. We think extracting the raw EEG data is important because it segregates into many different applications. We initially believed in divulging into the field of video games with Helena around with her expertise on video gaming, but now that she’s not here anymore, we decided to adjust our human resources. With new additions to our team, Esteban and Sebastian, we decided to confer with him to find out what they are especially good at. Sebastian has specialties in the neurosciences- he recently took neuroscience class at Hunter College over the summer. He is working with Ryan to analyze the raw data. Esteban and Andres are going to work on the actual application. As of right now, we don’t exactly know how to drive the project further, but we are discussing where we can bring the biofeedback area to because creating a video game is not viable as an application.  We believe that doing a video game is not viable because of our lack of knowledge in video games and the lack of interest in the whole community. The video game community is not wide-spread and not everyone plays video games, which is why we decided to take biofeedback elsewhere. 

Solution: The group needs to talk it out and decide what we want to invest our time into; meanwhile, Sebastian and Ryan will research the analysis of raw EEG data (conversion of quantitative data to qualitative data)

Dates:

Meeting with Mr. Lin: 11/14/14

Decide on an outlet for Biofeedback input 11/17/14

Meeting with Mr. Lin: 11/18/14

Progress Report 11/5/14

Progress: 
This week has been very important to the development of our project. Last week we lost Helana because she had to leave school, but this week we were able to add Esteban and Sebastian to our team. By having more people working on this project, we'll be able to cover more in a shorter period of time. Now we can divide the work evenly so that we can be working in parallel. While Esteban and Ryan work on the biofeedback aspect of the game,  Sebastian and I can work on the video game itself. This is important because Ryan and I kept going back and forth between biofeedback and the video game and it felt like nothing was being accomplished. Now we have our definite roles and can finally make more progress. We have decided this week that we will still develop a video game that incorporates biofeedback to show that biofeedback is actually effective. However, we still know that there is a whole industry for biofeedback that we can explore after we finish our video game.

In other news, Ryan downloaded the application to record the data and is testing it out with Esteban.
I have shown Sebastian the tutorials for Maya so that he can understand how it works.

Problem:
We have covered quite a lot during the past few months and we're going to have to catch Esteban and Sebastian up with everything. Ryan is going to have to explain to Esteban how MindWave works, while I'm going to have to explain to Sebastian the plan for the game, including the gameplay, the setting, and the characters. It's going to take a while catching them up with everything.

Solution:
I am going to show Sebastian all of the tutorials and explain to him what we want the game to look like and how we plan on adding biofeedback into the gameplay. Ryan will demonstrate how biofeedback works to Esteban by showing him the apps that MindWave came with.