Exploration of Brain-Computer Interaction for Supporting Children’s Attention Training: A Multimodal Design Based on Attention Network and Gamification Design

Recent developments in brain–computer interface (BCI) technology have shown great potential in terms of estimating users’ mental state and supporting children’s attention training. However, existing training tasks are relatively simple and lack a reliable task-generation process. Moreover, the training experience has not been deeply studied, and the empirical validation of the training effect is still insufficient. This study thusly proposed a BCI training system for children’s attention improvement. In particular, to achieve a systematic training process, the attention network was referred to generate the training games for alerting, orienting and executive attentions, and to improve the training experience and adherence, the gamification design theory was introduced to derive attractive training tasks. A preliminary experiment was conducted to set and modify the training parameters. Subsequently, a series of contrasting user experiments were organized to examine the impact of BCI training. To test the training effect of the proposed system, a hypothesis-testing approach was adopted. The results revealed that the proposed BCI gamification attention training system can significantly improve the participants’ attention behaviors and concentration ability. Moreover, an immersive, inspiring and smooth training process can be created, and a pleasant user experience can be achieved. Generally, this work is promising in terms of providing a valuable reference for related practices, especially for how to generate BCI attention training tasks using attention networks and how to improve training adherence by integrating multimodal gamification elements.