Analysis of a Low-Cost EEG Monitoring System and Dry Electrodes toward Clinical Use in the Neonatal ICU

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG) is an important clinical tool for monitoring neurological health. However, the required equipment, expertise, and patient preparation inhibits its use outside of tertiary care. Non-experts struggle to obtain high-quality EEG due to its low amplitude and artefact susceptibility. Wet electrodes are currently used, which require abrasive/conductive gels to reduce skin-electrode impedance. Advances in dry electrodes, which do not require gels, have simplified this process. However, the assessment of dry electrodes on neonates is limited due to health and safety barriers. This study presents a simulation framework for assessing the quality of EEG systems using a neonatal EEG database, without the use of human participants. The framework is used to evaluate a low-cost EEG acquisition system and compare performance of wet and dry (Micro Transdermal Interface Platforms (MicroTIPs), g.tec-g.SAHARA) electrodes using accurately acquired impedance models. A separate experiment assessing the electrodes on adult participants was conducted to verify the simulation framework’s efficacy. Dry electrodes have higher impedance than wet electrodes, causing a reduction in signal quality. However, MicroTIPs perform comparably to wet electrodes at the frontal region and g.tec-g.SAHARA performs well at the occipital region. Using the simulation framework, a 25dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was obtained for the low-cost EEG system. The tests on adults closely matched the simulated results.

Proposals and Comparisons from One-Sensor EEG and EOG Human-Machine Interfaces

“…To overcome these issues, dry electrodes that do not require any gel application [ 47 , 48 ] or semi-dry electrodes that only employ a tiny amount of conductive gel [ 49 , 50 , 51 ] have been proposed and implemented in HMIs in recent years. However, although these new dry electrodes offer a faster setup time and greater user comfort, they usually present a higher skin impedance than the wet ones [ 52 , 53 , 54 ]. Since this study aims to analyze the control signals on each user and determine which one offers the best performance, we decided to employ wet electrodes to obtain high-quality and low-impedance signals.…”

Basic Electroencephalogram and Its Common Clinical Applications in Children

“…Performing an EEG study is a time consuming process which require an expert EEG technician or neurophysiologist in order to obtain good quality EEG results for proper interpretation and reporting as the reading and analyzing EEG data is a hard task and must be interpreted by expert neurophysiologists. The location site and description of the scalp electrodes is well recognized by the international 10-20 system (Figure 3) [19,20].…”

EEG-Based Neurohaptics Research: A Literature Review

“…Obtaining high-quality EEG requires the use of abrasive/conductive gels to reduce skin-electrode impedance and a large number of electrodes (in the range of 32, 64, 128, or even 256) in order to achieve neural monitoring of suitable quality. It remains a challenge to develop a wearable, low-cost, dry electrode EEG monitoring system without compromising the quality of the EEG signal [130].…”