I was talking recently with Steve Francis, who remarked that he had heard I'd come up with something new and innovative in EEG and biofeedback training. Well, as it turns out, I have. I'd like to share with you what this effort entailed, and why I thought it was worth doing in the first place.
Biofeedback for the 21st century needs to offer far more dynamic, experiential, and rewarding possibilities for both clients and clinicians. As people become better informed about the human potential for healing and peak performance, they need more sophisticated and richly rewarding feedback systems that communicate through a variety of means on a variety of levels. Biofeedback as a profession must keep up with these needs, or be relegated to an "adjunctive" medical status that betrays its true capabilities.
Biofeedback ought to be inspiring for both clinicians and clients, and biofeedback instruments need to be entertaining, challenging, supportive, and flexible. During my 15 years as a clinician, researcher, and instructor in a professional biofeedback program, I became frustrated with the limitations of available equipment. I decided to design a system that would keep me excited, grow with me, and keep my clients enthusiastic about the feedback process. After eight years of effort, the result is the Bio Integrator.
The Bio Integrator is a high performance, general purpose biofeedback system that is truly easy to use and provides clients with highly engaging feedback displays that encourage them to continue training. Over the years, I've learned that clients are much more likely to succeed at training and work through the inevitable plateaus when they enjoy the process of training itself. This is why I built in an array of full-color line graphs, fill graphs, and spectral displays available as full screen displays, two per screen or four per screen. Since learning is enhanced when more than one sensory channel is engaged, I also included 60 different feedback "voices" ranging from calliope to violin so clients could work with a wide variety of audio feedback selections.
To provide even more variety and adventure, I designed over 100 mandalas, fractals and three-dimensional images that could be used to represent a client's physiology. Besides being brilliantly colorful and vivid, these displays "grow" as the client approaches his or her goal--a mandala may fill out with a rich blend of colors, or a sun may set in the ocean as hand temperature rises or EMG lowers. When clients work with these images, they receive immediate rewards of aesthetic gratification along with the satisfaction that accompanies successful training, and are inspired to explore their training at deeper levels.
One of the joys of the Bio Integrator is that the clinician can "conduct" a session, altering the feedback displays and adjusting the measurements, from an interface that is totally separate from the client's screen. Thus, clients are not distracted by pull-down menus or other housekeeping chores when they are working toward their goals. The clinician doesn't have to memorize keystrokes to avoid interrupting the training, since the user interface (clinician monitor) is available to be seen at all times.
One of the great challenges of a biosystem is the ability to handle electroencephalographic monitoring and feedback gracefully. Having employed computerized EEG monitoring and feedback since the early 1980s, I have been able to study and contemplate what new terrain might be open to us. By far the toughest challenge was to implement a set of ideas about EEG training that had been simmering in the back of my mind. I wanted convenient access to a wide variety of visual and audio representations of EEG activity; at the same time, I wanted the client's clinical experience to be very rich, stimulating, and aesthetically enticing. So many of the current biosystems have feedback displays that are overly complicated, "medical"-looking, and dull. The task was to overcome this common pitfall with displays that would speak to the client's imagination as well as provide information--something for each side of the brain. The mandalas, fractals, and three-dimensional art accomplish this nicely.
Also, I wanted to have an EEG display that would provide clients with complicated information in a clear manner. I developed a series of spectral displays, which represent a breakthrough in fluid, smoothly animated brainwave activity. A spectral display is a type of visual display that, unlike line graphs, does not move across the screen--instead, they move up and down, in accordance with changes in a measure such as amplitude. The trick in spectral display feedback is to get ultra-smooth animation so that there are no jerky movements, thus making it possible to watch subtle shifts in consciousness.
In addition to these spectral displays, the Bio Integrator features 48 EEG variables available at all times. These may be fed into line graphs that show the difference between right and left brain in theta, alpha, and beta, or used to drive beautiful sounds over a rich selection of EEG measures and bandwidths.
The Bio Integrator offers the smoothest integration of EEG and body measures available today. It provides a very powerful and exciting mixture of EEG, EMG, Temp, Heart Rate, SCL, and Respiration for monitoring and feedback.
It's been a tough eight years, giving birth to a vision with this much breadth and depth. But it has finally arrived. My clients tell me that training with the Bio Integrator is both delightful and motivating. My colleagues have shared my excitement during the gestation and birth, and I'm pleased to say that the system is available to those who share a similar vision of what biofeedback can be.
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