The Development of Brain Computer Interface-Based Music Player with the Function of Music Therapy for People with Dementia

This feasibility study aims to design an EEG-based brain-computer interface music player, which named as Harmony, for possibly helping people with dementia to reduce their symptoms and to reduce work loading in carers by music therapy. There needed a research into the relationship between demented patient’s brain wave and sound wave. The main concept of the Harmony will be a novel integration of a brain-computer interface (BCI) and a music player. Through two-ways BCI and multimedia technology, the proposed device will be able to collect and analyse EEG nerofeedback from the user, try to detect dementia in the early stage and provide a suitable music based on his/her real-time status of brain waves. It hopes to actively response the symptom and to reduce the pain of people with dementia by music therapy. In order to achieve the set-up aim, the feasibility study of our research will enter into the discovery of relationship between demented patient’s brain wave and sound wave and be divided into three groups based on the discipline: medicine, engineering and design. In medicine, it is mainly focusing the research on the exploration of the relationship between music types and the impact to demented patients and expects to develop a database with the knowledge of music and dementia by numbers of clinical studies not only observation but implementation of music therapy into demented patients. Our research in engineering is concentred on the development of a novel wireless technique of BCI in collecting EEG of demented patients. The research in design will propose three different concepts of Harmony, which consider user needs, user interfaces, the form of music player, and ergonomics of the proposed device in general. Finally, three dimensions in our research will be integrated by intensive cross-disciplinary collaboration not only in research issues of music therapy, brain-computer interface and human-computer interaction and then the proposal of second stage will be proposed.

Project ID:PB10007-1471
External Project ID:NSC100-2218-E182-003