Assessment of a 16-Channel Ambulatory Dry Electrode EEG for Remote Monitoring

Abstract

Ambulatory EEGs began emerging in the healthcare industry over the years, setting a new norm for long-term monitoring services. The present devices in the market are neither meant for remote monitoring due to their technical complexity nor for meeting clinical setting needs in epilepsy patient monitoring. In this paper, we propose an ambulatory EEG device, OptiEEG, that has low setup complexity, for the remote EEG monitoring of epilepsy patients. OptiEEG’s signal quality was compared with a gold standard clinical device, Natus. The experiment between OptiEEG and Natus included three different tests: eye open/close (EOC); hyperventilation (HV); and photic stimulation (PS). Statistical and wavelet analysis of retrieved data were presented when evaluating the performance of OptiEEG. The SNR and PSNR of OptiEEG were slightly lower than Natus, but within an acceptable bound. The standard deviations of MSE for both devices were almost in a similar range for the three tests. The frequency band energy analysis is consistent between the two devices. A rhythmic slowdown of theta and delta was observed in HV, whereas photic driving was observed during PS in both devices. The results validated the performance of OptiEEG as an acceptable EEG device for remote monitoring away from clinical environments.

State-of-the-Art on Brain-Computer Interface Technology

“…Recent advances in EEG sensor technology have made them smaller, lighter, and cheaper than ever before while still providing high levels of accuracy and reliability when compared to traditional systems [25,26,42]. Moreover, newer systems often make use of dry electrode designs, which eliminate the need for conductive gels that were previously required for proper functioning [43][44][45][46][47]. Furthermore, many new portable devices exist now that allow users to easily record their own EEG signals without having to visit a clinic [9,[48][49][50][51].…”