The UMH Brain-Machine Interface Systems Lab research group and the company DESINOPE from Elche have collaborated on a project focused on analysing the cognitive and unconscious processes associated with the comfort of wearing certain footwear.
Specifically, in the project an investigation has been carried out to distinguish between the state of comfort and discomfort when wearing footwear from the analysis of the electroencephalographic (EEG) signals recorded on the cerebral cortex of the person. In this project, whose director is UMH professor José María Azorín, professors Eduardo Ibáñez and Mario Ortiz have also participated on behalf of the UMH. In the project, tests have been carried out at DESINOPE and at the UMH facilities with more than 40 volunteers whose brain activity has been recorded while they wore various types of footwear and walked at a constant speed on a treadmill.
After analysing their brain activity using different algorithms developed by the UMH group, the possibility of discerning between the state of comfort and discomfort based on brain activity has been verified with a percentage of accuracy greater than 84% for the subjects participating in the project.
In this way, this research makes it possible to advance in the understanding of the brain patterns involved in the perception of comfort, quantitatively evaluating the subjective part of traditional product evaluations based on surveys and use tests. DESINOPE, for its part, additionally develops various applications of neurotechnology from the recording and advanced mathematical processing of EEG signals. This project has received partial funding from CDTI (CONFORTBRAIN-IDI-20190094).