Zukor's Carnival and Zukor Media Player

We've just added two new Zukor products to the BFE online shop!
Following an enthusiastic turnout for the free demonstration of Zukor's Air in the spring of 2015, the BFE is scheduling  a similar demonstration for Zukor's Carnival and Zukor Media Player. Not sure what the two newest Zukor Interactive games are? Then please read on.

Training with Carnival Games
Have you ever been to a local fair or amusement park, where there were simple games lining the walkways? Games like tossing a ring onto a post, throwing a dart through balloon and knocking over stacked blocks with a ball, along with the accompanying stuffed animals and toy prizes for doing well? Zukor's Carnival takes this familiar experience and packages into an immersive and entertaining biofeedback and neurofeedback game.

The hallmark of what makes Zukor's Carnival great, not to mention the other Zukor Interactive products, is that self-regulation is the basis of the game. Unlike in reality, a clients' success isn't based on the flick of their wrist when throwing a dart, or how they hold the ball. Instead, it's their ability to maintain the desired psychophysiological state based on heart rate variability, brainwaves or other measurements, which determines if the ring/ball/dart hits the target. Points are scored as clients do well in the games and amassing enough points allows the unlocking of the other 9 games.

Mixed amongst the standard fairground games are also creative, fantastical plays on real-work games. Anyone up for bouncing fireballs onto a target?

Zukor's Carnival is a great addition to the Zukor repetoir of bio/neurofeedback games, and it really is a creative jump in a new direction from the predecessors Zukor's Grind and Air. The only potential drawback is that some of your clients might really want you to give them a giant stuffed animal after a successful feedback session.

Zukor Media Player - Easy Movie and Video Feedback
Based solely on its name, Zukor Media Player is a predicatively easy tool to understand: it plays media. Videos, music, still images - anything you can download onto your computer or insert into your DVD/CD drive, it can use. You might ask yourself "Well what does it use this media for? Zukor Media Player provides an easy answer to "I wish I could use that for our biofeedback/neurofeedback session". With the player, a clinician can now throw any common video file, picture, song, DVD or CD into a feedback protocol.

Have some cute photos of a client's children? It can use that.
Downloaded an awesome video WITH sound? It can use that.
Want to play the client's favorite music? It can use that.

On-top of the Zukor Media Player's ability to use all common file formats, it can even add feedback effects on-top of the original video/pictures/music. For example, when training an athlete to "get in the zone", the chosen video or movie will play normally as they maintain the desired elevated state of self-regulation. If the athlete, however, falls out of focus, we can choose to have the video image slowly blur, as if the viewer is closing their eyes. Their personalized session is created from your choice of video and the applied negative feedback effect. If they don't like the blurring effect, you can instead have clouds move over the image, or make the picture shrink...

You can even mix-and-match feedback effects: a second example could be when that ideal state remains un-attained, the video's sound can be set to decrease in volume AND the video image slowly gets covered in rainfall AND distorts. Based on preference, 16 potential effects can be applied to manipulate the feedback of a video file, from pixilation, snow falling, glittery stars rising, loss of colour, fisheye distortion...

With the Zukor Media Player, a clinician can personalize the feedback content to each client, without the typical hassles that come with the common feedback programs on their own: few to no compatibility problems; no "place the file in a certain folder location"; no being stuck with ugly videos and pictures. Just useful time spent with the client.

YouTube Upgrade
An as optional extra, you can get creative with the choice of feedback videos using the internet's biggest cache of them. With an additional YouTube upgrade, clinicians just need to enter in the address to their favorite YouTube video so that Zukor Media Player will use that for feedback. No need to buy or download animations to the computer. Clients can even get the option to choose some of their favorite YouTube videos for the sessions, with minimal hassle for the clinic.

If you're interested in learning more about Zukor's Carnival and Zukor Media Player, please join the free, interactive demonstrations that will be held by Jon Bale, the BFE's research manager, on February 10, 2015. Get a chance to see the game and player in action, as well as to ask Jon any questions you might have about them.

This event has already taken place.
Click here to view the recorded presentation.



As a reminder, any clinician interested in purchasing Zukor's Carnival or Zukor Media Player from the BFE is entitled to a 30-minute introductory session on the game with Jon Bale. 

Click here to purchase Zukor's Carnival Feedback Game
Click here to purchase Zukor Media Player

Zukor's Grind Review - The BFE Weighs In

The BFE's Research Manager Jon Bale reviews Zukor's Grind - A next-generation feedback game for neurofeedback and biofeedback.


"We're having trouble engaging our younger patients. Do you have anything that's good to use with kids?"
"I'm looking for something that's more video-gamey..."
"Do you have any feedback better than just these animations?"

These are some of comments I receive in emails and hear from time to time in the BFE online sessions. Clinical applicability and concise data collection are definite cornerstones in biofeedback and neurofeedback, but health professionals also care about subject engagement. They want their feedback tools to impress their clients with cool graphics and imagery, illicit of video games we see on the market today. Watching animations or DVDs is not always enough, so clinicians are always keeping their eyes open for that next application that can capture the attention in their practice.

This is where Zukor's Grind comes to impress. 

Zukor's Grind is both a biofeedback/neurofeedback training tool and video game. The normal type of training that we are all accustomed to is with bar graphs, thresholds,  feedback animations and/or DVDs. Zukor's Grind enhances training by replacing the simple feedback animations and DVDs with a feedback skateboarding game. Changes in the subject's physiology or brainwaves dictate the pace and progress of the game, the number of points scored, what skateboarding tricks are achieved, and which special effects are activated. 

If, for example,  you are training the subject's heart rate variability using spectral frequencies, as the Low Frequency (0.08 - 0.12 Hz) percent of total power increases, the skateboarding character performs a variety of skateboarding tricks and gains points to reward the subject. If self-regulation is maintained successfully for longer periods of time, periodic special events take place to reward the player as the skateboarding character progresses through the choice of levels.

There's no doubt in my mind that children and teenagers (and even some adults) will respond to Zukor's Grind. It is similar in terms of visual design and detail levels to what one can find on the market for true video games. Those younger subjects that are marked with difficulties paying attention and responding to a computer screen, who often remark "this is boring", will become a little less difficult for you.  The many settings that control the feedback in the game can also be easily toggled on and off, meaning each cool effect, sound or background feature can be adjusted. Progressively adding or changing game elements every few sessions could continually spur the subject's motivation with the therapy.

A question that arose: would I really want to use the a video game-like tool with an ADHD boy, where I am down-training Theta (4-8Hz) and up-training Beta (15-21Hz)? Would I be improving attentional issues, or simply presenting something that the subject would naturally already respond to? Would this training extend to mundane moments when attention is important, like listening to a boring teacher? 

My above, initial concerns with Zukor's Grind regarding novelty and over-stimulation were alleviated by regulating the game's use and adjusting game settings. The game can be used as a reward from "standard" training, such as the last 5-10 minutes of a successful training session. Even if the subject's ability to pay attention is based somewhat on the novelty of the game and the its flashiness, they are still be training during these "reward periods".  The game's detailed setting can also be turned down, in order to avoid artificial attention unrelated to the subject's "working to focus".

To see for yourself, play my review video below to get a better idea of what the game looks like, the settings you can play with and how the game is set up from the perspective of both the clinician and client.

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At the BFE, I maintain an air of skepticism when manufacturers and developers come to show us their amazing, must-have product. Most of the time, what they have to present does not interest me. Personally, I lose immediate interest with any hint of marketing buzzwords and over-descriptive use of adjectives. My initial reaction to the Zukor's Grind pitch was similar, but upon using the game in a training session my opinion quickly changed. I'm stoked for skateboarding with my brain!

Zukor's Grind is now available in the BFE Online Shop. Click here for more information.