Opening up the Design Space of Neurofeedback Brain–Computer Interfaces for Children
Brain-Computer Interfaces for Self-Regulation in Children?
Oftentimes in media we are bombarded with headlines such as “Is Your Child Getting too Much Screen Time?”, making parents, teachers, researchers, and treaters pause at the thought of incorporating more technology into youth’s lives. With childhood depression and anxiety on the rise during the Covid-19 epidemic, we fear more than ever before how technology could be not just shaping, but also harming kid’s mental health outcomes. But what if the iPad that we desperately fear our child sitting in front of for hours — what if it could actually effectively improve not only the mental health, but the social-emotional, educational, and economic outcomes for millions of children?
That’s the question researchers led by Dr. Alissa Antle, out of Canada, aimed to answer in 2018 when they designed a study using neurofeedback, which is when a user can view and also respond to their brain state information. They wanted to create an effective clinical neurofeedback brain-computer interface that would assist children in self-regulation of feelings and thoughts. They called their system “Mind-Full”. This was implemented in a small group of girls ages 5–10 at a non-profit school for children suffering from complex poverty related trauma in Nepal. These traumas included: domestic violence, neglect, malnutrition, illness, and civil war. All of the girls had reported troubles related to self-regulating their anxieties and attention which was impacting their studies. Delayed development of self-regulation has been linked to complex trauma exposure. It was reported that some of the difficulties they faced while at school were trouble calming themselves when they came into the classroom, or after a break, or during transitions. As well as also difficulty paying attention to instructions and focusing on their learning tasks.
So how did Antle and her team implement a clinical neurofeedback brain-computer interface into a Nepalese school, and have it gel into the curriculum, culture, and lifestyle of these children? How did they structure their tool to work so successfully? Well, for starters they made sure to use embodied metaphors to structure their interaction model. What does that mean exactly? It links experiences we have in our bodies with ideas or concepts we have in our brains. In the Mind-Full system, each game identified had an interaction model that was structured based on a body-brain embodied metaphor. It was embedded with the body-brain mappings into a familiar activity that would prompt a child to enact the desired body state (i.e., still is calm). In Mind-Full’s game design they had animated iconic objects taken from each metaphoric activity to represent the current body-brain state. It was then the feedback model was introduced by first presenting an animation of a child enacting the desired body state and causing the iconic object to change state, this showed the relationship between the body and the brain. Then the same scene was presented with the object, but without the animated child, thus giving the real child a turn to try. The child can also tap through the game with their finger, making literacy something that is not required.
The Mind-Full system also has something called “real-time distributed adaptation”, which enables another person, like a teacher or counselor to adapt the system in real time to fit the child. There are two apps, the actual game the child uses and the Calibrate app, which a teacher may use to adapt the system for a unique and tailored experience for the child using it. If a child was having extra difficulty that day self-regulating their anxiety and could not calm down, the counselor working with them could then customize in the Calibrate app working on their relaxation levels.
What is really interesting about Antle’s Mind-Full program is she was approached by two different schools after to implement her work with them, one in an urban setting and one in an indigenous setting. These different schools had different populations, with different emotional and cognitive needs. Therefore, Antle and her team created different versions of the Mind-Full program specific to these areas, using graphics that were culturally significant too. They used the same thematic cartoon content in the design that was related to the indigenous culture, as they were located in Canada, so the urban setting children could relate, there was crossover. What was specific to the urban school setting was that they were testing the program on young boys who had attention and working memory issues.
Antle and her team propose that this type of neurofeedback brain-computer interface child-centric program could be used in self-regulating other things in children such as pain and sadness as well. As technology expands, and things like AI are becoming more commonplace (I mean how many of us are guilty of having an Alexa?), how soon will neurofeedback be making its way into schools, doctors’ offices, and living rooms? Perhaps think twice about what the possibilities are when your child asks if they can have screen time when that next, inevitable occurrence happens.
Antle, Alissa & Chesick, Leslie & McLaren, Elgin-Skye. (2018). Opening up the Design Space of Neurofeedback Brain — Computer Interfaces for Children. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. 24. 1–33. 10.1145/3131607.
