Neurofeedback for Trauma

njriley96njriley96 NY
edited February 2018 in Software
Hi,

I did about 40 sessions of clinical neurofeedback for my developmental trauma (C-PTSD), but stopped because of financial reasons. The clinician used Cygnet ILF and it worked perfectly with the Othmers' protocol -- better than either of us expected.

With my Ganglion, I am very interested in "emulating" Cygnet's effectiveness as closely as possible in another program. Is there already something out there that can do this? I know BioEra and BioExplorer are great and have out-of-the-box solutions, but they are very expensive for me and I'm hoping to make it happen for free or sub-$200 as money isn't my strong suit right now. BrainBay is free but does not seem to include effective NF designs.

Is there a free or sub-$200 solution (whether a program or a design) I've missed that would work for me?

If there's no good solution for under $200, where would I start if I wanted to implement something myself that can get great results like Cygnet? Would I be able to do so in BrainBay, or would there be some need for me to program something in C/C++/Python (as I am a competent programmer)? Is there some resource from which I can learn exactly what Cygnet (or a similar program) does, so I can reimplement it?

Thank you,
njriley96

Comments

  • wjcroftwjcroft Mount Shasta, CA
    NJ, hi.

    Sebern Fisher has a good book which contains various of her DTD / PTSD neurofeedback protocols. These are mostly 2 and 1 channel designs, rewarding / inhibiting various bands.


    Those could be implemented with BrainBay. Here is a tutorial on how BrainBay can implement simple alpha reward / beta inhibit, using OpenBCI Cyton. You'd just need some minor mods to adapt to Ganglion.


    The internals of Cygnet are proprietary and not published. However there have been various articles and papers written on ILF / ISF training,

    [Fall 2013 issue of ISNR NeuroConnections; "What's happening below .5 hz?"]

    [all issues]

    A couple related recent threads here on the forum, mentioning QEEG, etc.


    William

  • wjcroftwjcroft Mount Shasta, CA
    Several videos with Sebern on Youtube,


  • njriley96njriley96 NY
    Thank you William! Just the type of info I was looking for.

    There are certain features that can be found in Cygnet that I'm interested in implementing -- artifact detection and removal (e.g. eye blinks), 2-channel sum training, ILF, adjustable reward and inhibit percent success, seeing trend lines for different bands, and the ability to give feedback via an A/V filter on a media player.

    Would these all be implementable in BrainBay? If not, which ones would require additional research and programming on my part?
  • wjcroftwjcroft Mount Shasta, CA
    edited February 2018
    Did you look at the link for the BrainBay tutorial above. It shows trend lines, channel amplitude arithmetic expressions, adjustable rewards, etc. Most simple neurofeedback apps do artifact removal by just filtering out all EEG above a settable microvolts limit, such as 80 microvolts.

    ILF / ISF protocols have a considerable element of being an "art form", and are not for the most part documented. The ISNR link I gave has more background info, but still likely not enough to do your own. The three ILF protocols I am aware of differ widely in their methodologies.

    The reason I gave you Sebern's info is that HER protocols are completely divulged in the book, and you could try some of those. They are band based reward / inhibit. There are many many types of neurofeedback. ILF is just one of them. Since you've had 40 sessions of ILF, you might have already topped out on what it can do for you.

    BrainBay is great, open source and lots of features. And... BioEra has hugely more capabilities; and is in fact the engine behind Cygnet, LENS, etc. But the price is more complexity in programming the function blocks.
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