2.3. Research Apparatus
cognitive and motor skills, CM
Two DELL Inspiron (500 series) laptops (DELL LLC, Austin, TX, USA) with a 17.3″ screen and 2 Nintendo Wii Balance Board (Nintendo, Kioto, Japan) posturographic platforms of 30 × 50 cm, integrated for the OpenBCI services, were used in all training sessions. Moreover, an open-source DynamicCognition training on the basis of OpenBCI brain–computer interference platform (GNU GPL v3.0 license), operating with Ubuntu 14.04 software, was used. It is designed to improve planning and switching of attention during balance control exercises.The game consisted of 388 mazes (of increasing difficulty level of cognitive and motor skills) divided into 8 levels of difficulty—higher levels were characterized by a greater number of steps needed to reach the goal. Each maze board was made of 64 square areas (8 × 8). Participants were to navigate through mazes using a green ball, controlled, depending on the experimental group, either by the deviation of the feet pressure center on the posturographic platform (Nintendo Wii Balance Board) (CM and MT group) or by a computer keyboard (CT group). The participants’ task was to move the ball in such a way as to reach the green cross marking the end of the maze, without falling into the area of the “black hole” that would restart the level. After falling into the “black hole” three times, the player went back to the lower level of the task. When moving around the maze, the rules for the ball movement had to be taken into account: the ball moved in a straight line, and it moved until it hit an obstacle (walls, holes, or a cross).