Benchmarking of the BITalino biomedical toolkit against an established gold standard

Abstract

The low-cost multimodal platform BITalino is being increasingly used for educational and research purposes. However, there is still a lack of well-structured work comparing data acquired by this toolkit against a reference device, using established experimental protocols. This work intends to fill the said gap by benchmarking the performance of BITalino against the BioPac MP35 Student Lab Pro device. This work followed a methodical experimental protocol to acquire data from the two devices simultaneously. Four physiological signals were acquired: electrocardiography, electromyography, electrodermal activity and electroencephalography. Root mean square error and coefficient of determination were computed to analyse differences between BITalino and BioPac. Electrodermal activity signals were very similar for the two devices, even without applying any major signal processing techniques. For electrocardiography, a simple morphological comparison also revealed high similarity between devices, and this similarity increased after a common segmentation procedure was followed. Regarding electromyography and electroencephalography data, the approach consisted of comparing features extracted using common post-processing methods. The differences between BITalino and BioPac were again small. Overall, the results presented here show a close similarity between data acquired by the BITalino and by the reference device. This is an important validation step for all researchers working with this multimodal platform.

From Biodata to Somadata

“…For the workshop focused on the topic of synchrony (see Stage 4 above), we designed a coupling in a form of two artefacts (Figure 3c) that were meant to be hand-held by different people, each hosting a uniaxial ACC. They were linked to the BITalino [7,5] biosignal platform and a simple algorithm that processed and mapped acceleration differences between the two ACC artefacts to pitch modulation. The coupling, inspired by the topic of synchrony, was made to show differences in movement between the two artefacts.…”

Early Detection of Atrial Fibrillation Based on ECG Signals

“…For ECG acquisition using Bitalino, two sampling frequencies, 100 and 1000 Hz, are available. A recent study [18] shows "a close similarity between data acquired by the BITalino and by the reference device." The output of the sensor, the extracted heart signal, was sent to the central processing unit, Arduino microcontroller port, for monitoring and counting purposes.…”

Biosensing and Actuation—Platforms Coupling Body Input-Output Modalities for Affective Technologies

“…Together, we explored for three days the Soma Bits in several design contexts, including VR applications and leg prosthetics for dancers. During this workshop, we introduced sensing, apart from actuation, through the BITalino prototyping platform [ 25 , 55 , 56 ]. We also initiated the design of couplings between sensing and actuation, for example by translating movement through acceleration, to sound.…”

“…We present a selection of studied biosignals (see Figure 1 ) that can be incorporated into the creation of new technologies for affective health. We focus on a subset of biosignals present in the BITalino revolution do-it-yourself (DIY) low-cost biosensing platform [ 25 , 55 , 56 ] that backed and inspired some of our research in affective technologies. These, although not an exhaustive list, are to some extent physiological signals that have become standard for physiology tracking research—slowly crossing disciplines and making their way into affective health tracking, interaction design, and other domains of interest.…”