The Campaign

Many developed countries face an ever-increasingly aging society and therefore have many issues with caregiving. For instance, caregivers leave their jobs more than before and in the worst cases, they also sometimes treat patients cruelly. We interviewed the caregiving staff and noticed that most of the issues are that caregivers lose motivation by lack of communication between the patients who cannot reply and caregivers. In this project, we aim to provide new support for the caregivers to help them better understand the needs of their patients.

Creative Execution

For the sake of communication between bedridden people and caregivers, we focus on brainwave. That is because brain responds according to human intention, feelings and behavior. Actually, in order to estimate patients’ feelings based on neuroscience, it is required to prepare expensive and complex systems. However, in the scene of caregiving, it is impossible to arrange the high-quality setup. To disseminate communication between severe patients and caregivers, even non-technologist should be able to use the system which estimate patients feeling easily. Therefore, we attempted to miniaturize an electroencephalograph and develop a mobile application which understand feelings. With this app, anyone can talk to the patients more than before, and give some treatment individually according to their responses anywhere. This will also help keep motivation up for caregivers. Also, we can expand this emotion translation know-how to the marketing fields, such as in product development and qualitative research.

We focused on biological signals, especially brain waves, as the basis of our emotion grasping technology. This way, we can easily track emotions in real time. Cooperating with Prof. Mitsukura, who is an expert in processing biological signals, we collected and analyzed brain waves more than 10 thousand samples utilizing her know-how. Testing and analyzing all combinations of brainwave frequency had not been done before. From the results, we found some patterns, e.g. when people react to things that are interested in, like, get stressed about or concentrate on. Based on these findings, we developed an algorithm for 4 presumed feelings, interest, like, stress and concentration. Furthermore, we cooperated with hardware venture neurosky and updated the algorithm to operate on commercial small electroencephalograph and on iPads. These are used in some medicine/nursing facilities already, for better caring and better communication between caregivers and the patients.

As the people in the experiment cannot respond at all, the caregivers sometimes ask themselves ‘’ Am I giving the right kind of care? “ Needless to say, all medicine/ nursing is based on communication. Therefore, understanding the patients is the most important thing. Even if the patients cannot reply, they have feelings and emotions. In order to communicate with severe bedridden patients, it is important to provide the ways to convey their condition and feelings. That’s why we developed this app to understand how the critically injured patients feel.