How encephalography and neurotechnology are connected today
Technology for brain research
In our case, a new application is important for a long timeexisting technology. 10-15 years ago, people made a quantum leap, and encephalography began to be used in everyday life. Neurointerfaces have appeared - devices that we use in our projects to read brain activity.
More recently, there has been a breakthrough in understandinghow to use this technology for business, team development and individual development. Stream data processing platforms are being created that, based on machine learning, interpret EEG into specific human states and identify relationships between states and productive activity.
Based on data obtained throughneural interfaces, reports are compiled on the state of an individual person or group of people in relation to a specific activity or context. For example, neural interfaces are used as a tool to help people meditate better. Or to solve the problem of identifying meta-competencies (soft skills) in candidates.
However, there are also obstacles to widespreaduse of encephalography. The main one is the low level of awareness of companies and people about the specific benefits that knowledge about the brain and neurotechnology can bring for the regular activities of people and companies. Chipping fears and the dangerous impact of 5G are also holding back the technology's practical application in business.
Often people don't want anyone to“looked” into their heads. Innovative clients who are ready to bring specific problems and business challenges to the forefront and use the results obtained to solve them will help cope with the situation.
How neurotechnology helps to find out if a person is burned out
The main focus of the current work is the construction“bridge” between scientific research developments and specific tasks. To do this, the market is studied, companies and situations where neurotechnologies can be applied are searched.
After each neurotechnology implementation projectSeveral variations appear to continue cooperation. Based on the first results, a decision is made on how to further improve and influence the measurable metrics. A separate manual is developed for each situation, and the provider’s participation is limited to providing the customer with technical capabilities for processing information.
Similar work is being done in the area of management.When teams working on one or more products interact, an effect occurs when the result depends not only on one employee, but on many people. And it is worth considering that all people have different productivity at different times of the day. They solve problems differently and react to new ones.
With the help of neurotechnologies it is determined howthe team member understood the task well. You can detect a moment of misunderstanding, even if a person says that he understands everything. As a result, the manager has the opportunity to plan the work of the team based on the state of the employee - whether he was “burned out” on the previous task and whether he is ready to complete a new one in the same time. This ensures an environmentally friendly approach to people management while maintaining a high pace of task completion.
Additionally, training tasks are solvedemployees. For example, minimizing risks when a person passes a probationary period and starts serious tasks. For some companies, this is critical. So, at a metallurgical enterprise, an intern should not be allowed to perform hazardous work if he has not actually received all the necessary knowledge or misunderstood the instructions and is not ready to work. Because his mistake can lead to a halt in the production process and human casualties.
Learning using neurotechnologyminimizes situations of accidental passing of testing for obtaining a permit to work. If a new employee comes to the company, then in the course of training, the coefficient of assimilation of information is measured and recommendations are given on what to do with this person next: to continue training or not to hire at all.
Similar neuroproducts also address a large layer oftasks of personal planning, personal effectiveness, monitoring your condition or training it. For example, for the purpose of public speaking, you can train the optimal state that will allow you to perform effectively. The same is true for the optimal conditions of athletes in competition, salespeople in sales departments.
Of course, a person can come to such a stateby trial and error. But during special training, he sees the desired state on the computer screen and gets closer to the result faster. This process can be compared to shooting at a target with your eyes closed and open. The probability of hitting a target blindly is obviously low, and you need to shoot many times to get at least one bullet to hit the target.
How neurotechnology is being implemented
The NeuroAngel platform consists of severalcomponent. The core of the platform is an AI-based system that can interpret EEG into various psycho-emotional states and find connections between these states and production activities. And also knows how to learn to identify new states (for example, the state of a sales champion or the best product owner).
The core of the system is surrounded by business applications forspecific practical tasks and an integration bus that provides interaction with different models of neural interfaces and various business systems: CRM systems (Amo, Bitrix24), bug trackers (Jira, Github), LMS platforms (Moodle, Ispring). The neural interfaces themselves use those that are already on the market.
To learn how to determine the state of a person(for example, the level of his fatigue), it is necessary to present to artificial intelligence samples of encephalograms of people about whom we know in advance that they are tired or, conversely, full of energy. The more such samples we show to artificial intelligence, the better it will learn to distinguish them from each other.
This way you can train the platform for a variety of tasks.She can tell by the load on her brain whether a student is cheating on a test or solving it himself. Or it can determine how many more hours a driver can drive before losing vigilance and causing an emergency.
In each such case, you will need to measurea large number of people, whether they are schoolchildren who cheat and those who do not cheat, or drivers of varying degrees of fatigue. Today, a large database of various states has been accumulated, and on specific projects, basic models are adapted to the specifics of the activities of a particular company.
The system can simultaneously process data,related to different types of tasks. She can help some companies manage projects, while others at the same time - monitor the cheerfulness of dispatchers in critical areas of production.
Each of these application tasks requires differentways of presenting data. For some customers, the system will draw solid tables, for others – beautiful running graphs, for others it will send recommendations by email or display them in a mobile application.
Case study: a neuroscience study on brain responses to watching educational videos of varying duration
One of the customers of such neuroresearch -Netology decided to find out how people interact with their educational video content. Neurodiagnostics made it possible to understand how the human brain reacts to learning, regardless of what mood it is in now or how subjectively it relates to the taught content or the speaker. For the experiment, we chose the most painful of the hypotheses: does the duration of the video affect the effectiveness of training. Opinions on the optimal length of video content differed significantly from the sources available on the market.
Vertical - a source of information about the optimal video duration, horizontal - time intervals from 0 to 30 minutes
The study included monitoring the resource state of listeners in the context of four states:
- stress (level of negative emotional background);
- passion (degree of interest in the task being performed);
- concentration (the level of consumption of neural resources to complete the task);
- cognitive load (load on short-term memory).
The key goal of the study is to identify optimaltemporal parameters of educational video content. In total, three groups of seven people participated in the experiment, watching two video lessons with different durations: short (5 minutes), medium (10 minutes) or long (20 minutes).
The collected data for each student and the video they watched were combined into general graphs.
Further, for each of them, the median value was displayed, which showed the following results:
- Enthusiasm.On average, they turned out to be more interestingshort videos. Medium-length videos have more high-engagement moments. Participants who watched longer videos were, on average, the least engaged, less likely than others to experience moments of high engagement, and least likely to experience moments of minimal engagement.
- Stress.The highest average level of stress is inparticipants who watched short videos. Long videos are characterized by both situations of high stress (mobilization) and situations of low stress (relaxation), while neutral situations are less common. Those who watched videos of medium length showed the least stress.
- Concentration.The most concentrated participants werewatched average videos, and quite evenly throughout the video lessons. With short videos, participants do not have time to get involved in the work, so their concentration is minimal compared to other groups. Long-term videos show the greatest variation—there are many areas of high and low concentration.
- Cognitive load.Memory load with a short video sequenceexcessive – participants try to “swallow everything at once.” Optimal memory load is observed when watching medium-length videos. There is a low and medium level with jumps – moments of memorizing individual important facts.
Short videos from an emotional point of viewpassion, stress levels and memory load have the maximum effect. But people watch them in their entirety without really thinking about them. It is rational to use short videos as introductory topics to motivate further learning. Or use it for promotional materials about training, where the emotional moment is more important than the educational one.
The best option for learning simple professional skills is a medium-length video. People manage to concentrate, they are quite enthusiastic and strain their memory.
Long videos have an advantage whenlearning needs maximum concentration. Research has shown that it manifested itself in people precisely while watching 20-minute videos. It turns out that complex topics that cannot be explained simply or broken down into sections are best explained in the format of long videos. And so that the most difficult moment falls on the time of the student's peak concentration.
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