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.

中文翻译：

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用于大脑训练的触觉与视觉神经反馈：概念验证研究


目前使用患者的视觉和/或听觉通道进行神经反馈的做法已知会在长时间的治疗过程中导致疲劳、过度无聊和活动受限。本文提出触觉作为提供神经反馈的替代方法，并通过使用新型紧凑型可穿戴触觉设备（向用户颈部提供振动触觉反馈）进行两项用户研究（研究 I 和 II）来研究其有效性。每个用户研究都具有三种神经反馈模式：仅视觉、仅触觉以及视觉和触觉相结合。研究- I 通过测量参与者的注意力水平 (AL) 和任务完成时间 (CT) 来检查参与者在大脑训练任务中的表现。研究-II 除了大脑训练任务外，还调查参与者在接收神经反馈时执行次要任务（玩形状分类游戏）的能力。结果表明，用户在仅使用触觉反馈和仅使用视觉反馈的大脑训练中表现相似。然而，当从事次要任务时，用户使用触觉表现明显更好（AL 和 CT 分别提高了约 11% 和 17%），这表明触觉相对于视觉神经反馈具有明显的优势。能够在大脑训练期间进行日常活动可能会增加用户对更长治疗疗程的坚持。未来，我们计划通过对多动症患者进行实验来验证这些发现。