BCI Facilitates the Improvement of Cognitive Functions in Children and Elderly

Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology has been under exploration as an alternative approach to restore or enhance brain functions, possibly. One of the attempts is to use BCI to help improve human cognitive functions by leveraging on the BCI capability of predicting the cognitive states (for instance, attention) in real-time, and use it to drive a cognitive training program. In this presentation, we are going to introduce two categories of cognitive training based on BCI: (1) attention improvement for children with ADHD; (2) cognitive training for the elderly with cognitive decline. We recently completed two large- scale clinical trials based on this concept, one with 172 ADHD children and another with 224 elderly. In both clinical studies, the training program is built upon a feedforward attention training protocol. Significant improvement has been observed in both groups towards the training objectives. fMRI imaging study on the children cohort demonstrated functional changes towards the normal functional connectivity after the cognitive training.