It is time for professional societies, guideline committees, and healthcare payers to recognize Neurofeedback (NFB) as the best available first-line treatment for cognitive disorders such as ADHD or autism. NFB is built on combining real-time feedback of brain activity with the scientifically-established principles of operant conditioning to teach trainees how to self-regulate targeted aspects of brain functioning and neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to rapidly change and reorganize its neural pathways in response to new learning.

Our group purposes is to develop systems that can be used in neurofeedback therapy for clinical diagnosis and treatment of cognitive disorders. We have many projects to address the need of NFB therapy for clinical or self usage in collaboration with Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences of Shahid Beheshti University (SBU) under the supervision of professor Hamidreza Pouretemad and Dr. Reza Khosrowabadi.

BCI systems are appropriate choices for NFB therapy. BCI (Brain Compute Interface) is a system that measures central nervous system (CNS) activity and converts it into artificial output that replaces, restores, enhances, supplements, or improves natural CNS output and thereby changes the ongoing interactions between the CNS and its external or internal environment. BCI enables communication without movement, via thought alone which can be used to help severely disabled users send messages/commands  or in BCI-based games. This poster presents the main idea of BCI systems.

 

One of our ongoing projects is a BCI-based system for sessions of intervention to use neuofeedback therapy advantages in clinical rehabilitation of subjects with ADHD.  The proposed idea employs a physical game to encourage children in the treatment process and we built prototype of an automated guided vehicle (AGV) style robot that can be controlled by feature extracted from EEG signals.

If you are interested for further information contact with Mr Shirali (m_shirali@sbu.ac.ir).

Group Members:

Mohsen Shirali, Farzaneh Javidmehr, Fatemeh Latifi.

Our Future Works:

• Design and construction of a device for measurement of stress level in children with autism by Fatemeh Latifi