Preliminary study on haptic-stimulation based brainwave entrainment

Auditory or visual stimulation has been widely used for brainwave entrainment, i.e. to modulate brain electroencephalograms (EEG) signals into a specific target frequency band. In this work, we study whether similar phenomena exists with haptic stimulation. By using a Phantom desktop to provide a sinusoidal force stimulation to a human subject´s hand, and using a Nexus EEG device for real-time brain signal monitoring, we test how the Sensory Motor Rhythm (SMR) signal and the Alpha signal of the subject responds to the haptic stimulation. Our experiments show that the energy level of SMR signal tends to increase considerably (on average 10~30% of 8 human subjects) after 10-15 minutes of haptic stimulation with a 15Hz stimulation signal, and the energy level of Alpha signal tends to decrease considerably (on average 10~30% of 8 human subjects) after 10-15 minutes of haptic stimulation with a 10Hz stimulation signal. These results may have potential application in training human concentration and/or relaxation skills.