Peanut: Personalised Emotional Agent for Neurotechnology User-Training

Mental-Imagery based Brain-Computer Interfaces (MI-BCI) are neurotechnologies enabling users to control applications using their brain activity alone. Although promising, they are barely used outside laboratories because they are poorly reliable, partly due to inappropriate training protocols. Indeed, it has been shown that tense and non-autonomous users, that is to say those who require the greatest social presence and emotional support, struggle to use MI-BCI. Yet, the importance of such support during MI-BCI training is neglected. Therefore we designed and tested PEANUT, the first Learning Companion providing social presence and emotional support dedicated to the improvement of MI-BCI user-training. PEANUT was designed based on the literature , data analyses and user-studies. Promising results revealed that participants accompanied by PEANUT found the MI-BCI system significantly more usable.