Seeing into the brain of an actor with mocap and fNIRS

This paper introduces the idea of using wearable, multi-modal body and brain sensing, in a theatrical setting, for neuroscientific research. Wearable motion capture suits are used to track the body movements of two actors while they enact a sequence of scenes together. One actor additionally wears a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)-based headgear to record the activation patterns on his prefrontal cortex. Repetitions in the movement data are then used to automatically segment the fNIRS data for further analysis. This exploration reveals that the semi-structured and repeatable nature of theatre can provide a useful laboratory for neuroscience, and that wearable sensing is a promising method to achieve this. This is important because it points to a new way of researching the brain in a more natural, and social, environment than traditional lab-based methods.