Haptic vs. Visual Neurofeedback for Brain Training: A Proof-of-Concept Study

Abstract

The current practice of administering neurofeedback using the patients' visual and/or auditory channel(s) is known to cause fatigue, excessive boredom, and restricted mobility during prolonged therapy sessions. This paper proposes haptics as an alternative means to provide neurofeedback and investigates its effectiveness by conducting two user studies (Study-I & II ) using a novel compact wearable haptic device that provides vibrotactile feedback to the user's neck. Each user study has three neurofeedback modes: visual-only, haptics-only, and visual-and-haptics combined. Study-I examines the participant's performance in a brain-training task by measuring their attention level (AL) and the task completion time (CT). Study-II , in addition to the brain-training task, investigates the participants' ability to perform a secondary task (playing a shape-sorting game) while receiving the neurofeedback. Results show that users performed similarly well in brain-training with haptics-only and visual-only feedback. However, when engaged in a secondary task, the users performed significantly better (AL and CT improved around 11% and 17%, respectively) with haptics, indicating a clear advantage of haptics over visual neurofeedback. Being able to perform routine activities during brain-training would likely increase user adherence to longer therapy sessions. In the future, we plan to verify these findings by conducting experiments on ADHD-patients.

Modulating Individual Alpha Frequency through Short-Term Neurofeedback for Cognitive Enhancement in Healthy Young Adults

“…The modulation efficacy in the presented IAF neurofeedback may also be facilitated by the haptic feedback scheme, which is relatively rare in traditional neurofeedback studies and occasionally employed in research related to motor imagery and stroke rehabilitation [ 55 , 56 ]. Subjects receiving haptic feedback could maintain better attention and concentration during training, possibly because the boredom resulting from constant eye contact in visual feedback and distraction or anxiety in auditory feedback can be effectively avoided [ 57 ]. The type of feedback might also be connected to the underlying neural activities; for example, in our results, heat maps indicated the most significant changes in trained IAF were from central electrodes (Cz, C3, C4), which are directly above the somatosensory cortex and may be more sensitive to haptic information.…”

Remote neurocognitive interventions for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder – Opportunities and challenges

“…Previous research primarily employed visual, auditory, and haptic modalities for delivering feedback, with visual feedback being the most used. While haptic feedback has been found to be as effective as visual feedback (Shabani et al, 2021), visual feedback appears to induce better learning outcomes than auditory feedback (Hinterberger et al, 2004). One of the confounding factors in the comparative studies was the desire for different modalities of sensory feedback.…”

Motor Imagery-based Neurofeedback in Physiotherapy Practice

“…In NFB, brain activity is measured mainly by EEG [7], functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) [8], and functional near-infrared spectroscopy [9], and feedback on the activity in the targeted brain regions is provided to the participant to facilitate selfregulation of the participant's brain activity. The methods used to provide feedback include visual feedback [10], in which brain activity is projected on a monitor, and auditory feedback [11], which uses sound stimuli of different frequencies. These methods are used to encourage participants to voluntarily adjust their brain activity.…”