Design and Validation of a Wireless Body Sensor Network for Integrated EEG and HD-sEMG Acquisitions

Abstract

Sensorimotor integration is the process through which the human brain plans the motor program execution according to external sources. Within this context, corticomuscular and corticokinematic coherence analyses are common methods to investigate the mechanism underlying the central control of muscle activation. This requires the synchronous acquisition of several physiological signals, including EEG and sEMG. Nevertheless, physical constraints of the current, mostly wired, technologies limit their application in dynamic and naturalistic contexts. In fact, although many efforts were made in the development of biomedical instrumentation for EEG and HD-sEMG signal acquisition, the need for an integrated wireless system is emerging. We hereby describe the design and validation of a new fully wireless body sensor network for the integrated acquisition of EEG and HD-sEMG signals. This Body Sensor Network is composed of wireless bio-signal acquisition modules, named sensor units, and a set of synchronization modules used as a general-purpose system for time-locked recordings. The system was characterized in terms of accuracy of the synchronization and quality of the collected signals. An in-depth characterization of the entire system and an end-to-end comparison of the wireless EEG sensor unit with a wired benchmark EEG device were performed. The proposed device represents an advancement of the State-of-the-Art technology allowing the integrated acquisition of EEG and HD-sEMG signals for the study of sensorimotor integration.

Physical and electrophysiological motor unit characteristics are revealed with simultaneous high-density electromyography and ultrafast ultrasound imaging

“…HDsEMG signals were acquired during the entire contraction, while US images were detected for about 9 s in the middle of the acquisition. A rectangular pulse provided by an external generator (StimTrig; LISiN, Politecnico di Torino, Italy) was used to start the US acquisition and was concomitantly acquired by the HDsEMG system to synchronize EMG-US acquisitions 42 .…”

A fast blind source separation algorithm for decomposing ultrafast ultrasound images into spatiotemporal muscle unit kinematics

“…The sEMG signals were acquired during the entire contraction, while ultrasound images were detected for eight seconds in the middle of the acquisition. The ultrasound and sEMG recordings were synchronised based on an external generator (StimTrig; LISiN, Politecnico di Torino, Italy) [24].…”

Quantification of cortical proprioceptive processing through a wireless and miniaturized EEG amplifier

“…The movement range at the tip of the finger was 5 mm in accordance with [13]. Identical proprioceptive stimulation was repeated separately for wireless-EEG [10] and a wired-EEG (NeurOne Tesla, Oulu, Finland) recordings in pseudorandom order. Participants were comfortably seated on a chair with their right-hand relaxed on the hand-support plate of the movement actuator that was placed on a table in front of them.…”

“…EEG signals were recorded referenced to the FCz electrode of the cap and sampled at 2048 Hz (wireless EEG) or at 2000 Hz (wired EEG). For the wireless-EEG, the wireless synchronization system introduced in [10] was used to achieve a high degree of synchronization among signals from multiple sources (i.e. EEG and acceleration signals).…”