Using brain-computer interfaces to determine the location of missing people

Low-cost, non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) headsets have become increasingly popular in recent years. Most noteworthy is the adoption of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) by the non-academic community. Traditionally, these devices were used to assist persons with disabilities, but there has been a large momentum shift to applications for the regular consumer such as cognitive monitoring, cognitive well-being, entertainment, and personal software development through API's and other software development tools. It is believed that the acceptance and interest will continue to grow. We believe that BCIs will be incorporated into everyday life and could be used to benefit society. The application we propose in this paper is determining the location of missing people. Here we describe the background and methodology behind our approach to test the hypothesis that a BCI system can indeed be used to narrow down the location of a missing person, which includes the procedure for ongoing experimental work. BCI systems can be incorporated into games, also known as serious games, and entertainment environments such as movies and YouTube videos. The increased interest in serious games and user-generated content make these the perfect media for our research.