Cost-Efficient, Portable, and Custom Multi-Subject Electroencephalogram Recording System

Abstract

Multi-subject electroencephalogram (EEG) computing has attracted increasing interest in recent years. Commercial EEG headsets often lead to a space-required or cost-expensive setup for obtaining simultaneous recordings of multiple subjects. The sparsity or immobility of their electrode placements may compromise their realistic applicability. Thus, this work developed a cost-efficient, portable, and customizable system to mitigate these constraints. The developed system implemented two core hardware infrastructures, including an event broadcaster and a dry electrode-compatible EEG amplifier by assembling entirely low-cost, off-the-shelf electronic components. The broadcaster allowed distribution of event markers to multiple EEG amplifiers concurrently, whereas the amplifier transmitted the digitized, eventsynchronized EEG signals wirelessly. By conducting an oddball event-related potential (ERP) experiment with simultaneous recordings of three subjects on 10 days, the system reliably captured the time-and phaselocked ERP components (e.g., N100 and P300 amplitudes) by single-subject, multi-subject, and multi-day analytical approaches. The practicality and stability of the proposed system was empirically demonstrated in terms of the signal quality, EEG-event synchronization, and inter-amplifier coordination for a multi-subject setup. This work sheds light on how to economically facilitate and scale up multi-subject EEG computing for fundamental research and for brain-computer interface (BCI) applications in a larger subject population.

Vital Sign Monitoring in Car Seats Based on Electrocardiography, Ballistocardiography and Seismocardiography: A Review

“…Various inexpensive devices were tested to measure and analyze EEG recordings [ 110 , 111 , 112 , 113 ]. One of the first commercial, inexpensive devices applied for EEG was a headset from NeuroSky Mind-Wave, which was supposed to capture different levels of EEG [ 114 , 115 ].…”

“…Consumer-grade level EEG devices are becoming more and more popular. Among such systems are the above mentioned Neurosky headsets (Mind-Wave and MindWave Mobile), EPOC and FLEX from Emotiv, Ultracortex (Open BCI), ENOBIO (Neuroelectrics), DSI (QUASAR), interaXon, Smarting (mBrainTrain) or Quick (Cognionics) [ 110 , 112 , 113 , 118 ]. Especially Emotiv EPOC is a very popular and inexpensive solution which, despite the appearance of newer versions (Flex and Insight), is still being applied in numerous BCI-related projects [ 107 , 110 , 112 , 119 ].…”

Cost-efficient and Custom Electrode-holder Assembly Infrastructure for EEG Recordings

“…The integrity of mobile systems by various manufacturers has been thoroughly validated and reported [1,2,3]. Owing to its interesting advantages of price, usability, and mobility, a considerable number of recent studies has emerged highlighting the aforementioned advantages to encourage the study of EEG correlates of brain states and functions in multidisciplinary domains, such as preliminary perception (e.g., visual/auditory responses [4,5,6]), cognition capacity (e.g., attention relocation [7,8], face recognition [1], and memory processing [9,10]), and psychological reaction (e.g., affective response [11,12], mental fatigue [13], and working stress [14]). The exploited state-/task-related EEG associations can be further leveraged with machine learning to underpin a mobile brain-computer interface (BCI) for a vast range of applications, such as rehabilitative exoskeleton control [15], visual function loss [16], attentional responses [17], lapse mitigation [18], quadcopter control [19], and visual-search games [20].…”

“…Several research-grade and consumer-oriented mobile EEG devices are available in the market, such as Quick/Mobile series (Cognionics, Inc., San Diego, CA, USA), ENOBIO series (Neuroelectrics, Barcelona, Spain), Smarting (mBrainTrain, Inc., Belgrade, Serbia), Ultracortex (OpenBCI, Inc., Brooklyn, New York, USA), EPOC (Emotiv, Inc., San Francisco, California, USA), and MindWare (NeuroSky, Inc., San Jose, CA, USA). Their general technical specifications or other devices can be referred to [2,8,21]. As compared to conventional bulk, tethered systems in laboratory, the mobile system shares common features with miniaturized light-weight amplifier, wireless telemetry, and/or dry/gel/saline electrodes, facilitating the applicability of EEG recording with more naturalistic settings (e.g., non-stationary subjects [5,17]).…”

“…Aside from commercial products, continuous research effort has been invested in hardware innovation from the aspects of enhancing signal quality, device usability and mobility, cost efficiency, and practical applicability. Most endeavors have been directed to the counterparts of dry electrode [6,22,23,24,25,26,27,28], signal amplifier [4,8,22,29,30,31], and standalone computing [30]. Many commercial or customized mobile devices can be useful and provide acceptable/promising signal quality for specific circumstances.…”