Re: Newbie Questions

I should add that my primary interest is in machine learning/ai as applied
to real time neural time series data. As such, I initially didn't want to
get involved with the hardware and hoped that I could just purchase an eeg
device. You probably know that there a serious gulf between the consumer
level eeg devices (emotiv, openbci, etc) which run about $800 for developer
kits. The These have 500-100 Hz sampling, 24 bit adc resolution on up to 16
channels. On the other hand the research grade equipment (cognionics,
quasar) have over 60 channels with dry electrodes! After emailing some
sales reps I was dismayed to discover that they retail for round-abouts
$40K! While I am quite novice at EE, it seems to me that the most expensive
part of these systems are the adc chips which for high resolutions run
about $50 for an 8 channel chip. Aside from the design labor necessary to
route 64 channels worth of data efficiently through one or a few linked
micro controllers which build packets and tx to a pc, I think that the
other issue may be in designing electrode arrays which do not interfere
with one another, though I have not yet researched this much yet (best
believe that I will!)

I think that a worthy goal for this forum could be to engineer one of these
higher end systems, bringing openeeg up to speed with the times. I mean,
the old design uses RS232 for goodness sake! One concern would be that the
adc's alone for a 64 channel system could drive the cost from about $200
where it is now to well over $400 (which definitely beats $40k...) Anyhow,
regardless of the intended application, having more, higher resolution data
has its advantages. Since the current design only scales to 6 channels
because of the Atmega8, perhaps a design that scales higher but can operate
on as few as 8 or so would be optimal.

Martín A Molina

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