Closed Loop Neurotechnology Hackathon

I was selected to participate in the UK's first 'Closed Loop Neurotechnology' Hackathon 2025 which took place on 26th and 27th June at Imperial College London. 

The Hackathon challenge was to help people relax by increasing prefrontal alpha rhythm via closed loop auditory stimulation using Elemind's real world product that is meant for putting people to sleep.

Our closed loop design was based on neural entrainment to amplitude modulated pink noise sounds whose AM frequency is at the peak of the alpha rhythm dependent on individual subject's EEG recording.

We chose entrainment or resonant coupled oscillators model to increase alpha frequency since the communication delay between device and our Windows computer was too high on Python (even data loss) while on MATLAB it was 200-400ms variable delay. Under such conditions where delay is not constant and high, phase locked stimulation might back fire since it could decrease instead of increasing alpha power if mistimed. Hence our strategy chose entrainment. In any case, such USB driver issues were minimal on MacBooks which used Python.

We did not win [2] the contest but we are happy that we could end up fourth place after salvaging our situation (all team members were on Windows Laptop [3]) to demonstrate a powerful technique which stood Hackathon testing on 18 external subjects and 4 internal team members.

I thank the organizers for selecting me and awarding a travel grant to cover the expenses related my participation in this event.

Reference:

[1] https://research.ncl.ac.uk/close-nit/eventsfundingcalls/neurotechnologyhackathon/

[2] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/dementia-research-institute/events/closed-loop-neurotechnology-hackathon/

[3] On Windows the delay in getting the buffer was 200 to 400 ms (variable) unlike MacOS / Linux where it was fixed 20 ms delay. This variable large delay on windows is not good for closed loop real time implementation.