Research on Kansei-BMI (Brain-Machine Interface)

A new type of BMI (Brain-Machine Interface) has been proposed, which extracts a human's kansei (pathos or affective) information as his/her brain information and the machine responds depending on the kansei. For example, if "emotion" can be extracted as brain information and a BMI system is established using this brain information as control parameters, a person with speaking disabilities, if he/she wishes, can transmit his/her emotions through his/her avatar, i.e., a robot or an animated person. During the research period, our group has accumulated basic knowledge for constructing the "kansei BMI" in the following areas: cognition and synthesis of emotional speech, cognition of music or visual contents, brain responses during ultimate spiritual and physical activities taking the Hyakunin-Isshu karuta (card) game as an example, etc.