Section: New Results

Design and preliminary study of a neurofeedback protocol to self-regulate an EEG marker of drowsiness

Participants: Thibaut Monseigne, Fabien Lotte

External collaborators: Stéphanie Bioulac, Pierre Philip, Jean-Arthur Micoulaud-Franchi

Neurofeedback (NF) consists in using EEG measurements to guide users to perform a cognitive learning using information coming from their own brain activity, by means of a real-time sensory feedback (e.g., visual or auditory). Many NF approaches have been studied to improve attentional abilities, notably for attention deficit hyper activity disorder. However, to our knowledge, no NF solution has been proposed to specifically reduce drowsiness. Thus, we propose an EEG-NF solution to train users to self-regulate an EEG marker of drowsiness, and evaluate it with a preliminary study. Results with five healthy subjects showed that three of them could learn to self-regulate this EEG marker with a relatively short number of NF sessions (up to 8 sessions of 40 min). This work was published at the International Graz BCI conference in [27].