Comparison Between Active and Passive Attention Using EEG Waves and Deep Neural Network

A person’s state of attentiveness can be affected by various outside factors. Having energy, feeling tired, or even simply being distracted all play a role in someone’s level of attention. The task at hand can potentially affect the person’s attention or concentration level as well. In terms of students who take online courses, constantly watching lectures and conducting these courses solely online can cause lack of concentration or attention. Attention can be considered in two categories: passive or active. Conducting active and passive attention-based trials can reveal different states of attentiveness. This paper compares active and passive attention trial results of the two states, wide awake and tired. This has been done in order to uncover a difference in results between the two states. The data analyzed throughout this paper was collected from DSI 24 EEG equipment, and the generated EEG is processed through a 3D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to produce results. Three passive attention trials and three active attention trials were performed on seven subjects, while they were wide awake and when they were tired. The experiments on the preprocessed data results in accuracies as high as 81.78% for passive attention detection accuracy and 63.67% for active attention detection accuracy, which shown a clear ability to separate between the two attention categories.