[HN Gopher] EEG channels with low-cost PiEEG device
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       EEG channels with low-cost PiEEG device
        
       Author : ron_87
       Score  : 72 points
       Date   : 2024-03-29 19:49 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (pieeg.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (pieeg.com)
        
       | brcmthrowaway wrote:
       | Is this how the Neuralink device works?
        
         | _Microft wrote:
         | NeuraLink is using a specialized robot to surgically insert
         | very thin electrodes into the brain.
         | 
         | This device here uses good old wet or dry EEG electrodes that
         | are touching the outside of the head (e.g. on an EEG cap).
        
           | roughly wrote:
           | As a bad analogy, I've heard the difference between EEG and
           | implants described as pointing microphones at the outside of
           | a building vs having them inside the room.
        
             | hasmanean wrote:
             | Well at least you can tell if there's a party going on in
             | room 106.
        
             | plastic-enjoyer wrote:
             | Well, EEG is more like undirected microphones that record
             | the voices of several thousand people at the same time
             | outside of a building, whereas implants are more like
             | directed microphones inside the building that only record
             | the voices of a few people...
        
               | nextaccountic wrote:
               | It's worth noting that if each electrode is thin enough
               | to be placed in extracellular medium getting signals from
               | several neurons around it, you can do some fairly simple
               | signal processing to separate the signals of individual
               | neurons. This is called spike sorting [0] (a "spike" is
               | an impulse transmitted by a single neuron).
               | 
               | So, continuing with the microphone analogy, with the
               | right setup, recording a few voices is almost as good as
               | recording each voice separately. It's not perfect because
               | sometimes people talk over each other, and people distant
               | from the mic may have muffed voices, and stuff like that.
               | But generally speaking, we can roughly understand each
               | individual people in a recording, because each people
               | speak in a different way (and just like that, neurons
               | spike in a different way).
               | 
               | Here's some academic code that does this [1] (it has
               | accompanying articles [2] [3]) (Random article found in
               | Google, no affiliation).
               | 
               | The first thing it does is removing the low frequency
               | component of the signal (the LFP [4], that doesn't
               | originate from any specific neuron), then it stores each
               | individual spike waveform as a time series (a vector of N
               | dimensions, where each dimension is the value of the
               | signal at a moment in time), and then just does some
               | k-means clustering to separate spikes in clusters, then
               | assign each cluster to an individual neuron (by
               | hypothesizing that each neuron likes to spike in a
               | specific way which depends on its characteristics). This
               | is all very vanilla / undergraduate stuff, and it's been
               | done for more than 10 years [5] or perhaps even 20 years
               | or more.
               | 
               | Trouble is, with EEG all you have is essentially an
               | average of the LFP over a large area; you don't get
               | single-neuron spikes. So EEG fundamentally can't listen
               | to each neuron individually. However it isn't right to
               | simply throw away LFP information, and you can still do
               | stuff with it.
               | 
               | [0] http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Spike_sorting
               | 
               | [1] https://github.com/akcarsten/spike_sorting
               | 
               | [2] https://towardsdatascience.com/using-signal-
               | processing-to-ex...
               | 
               | [3] https://towardsdatascience.com/whos-talking-using-k-
               | means-cl...
               | 
               | [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_field_potential
               | 
               | [5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3657693/
        
           | brcmthrowaway wrote:
           | How does the neuralink get an advantage though, do neuron
           | spike signals contain any information
        
         | ron_87 wrote:
         | of course not
        
       | wpietri wrote:
       | I like the idea, but $350 plus a Pi plus getting electrodes is
       | beyond my "impulse by to try it out" price for sure.
        
         | ron_87 wrote:
         | yes, hat electrodes + plus about 300 dollars
        
         | y-curious wrote:
         | I work at a relatively unique EEG startup, and our single-
         | patient-use EEG headbands cost a bit more than this project.
         | 
         | That said, doing an EEG on yourself is a bit disappointing imo;
         | You won't get much interesting output.
        
           | m_kos wrote:
           | If you are at liberty to share, how many channels and are the
           | electrodes dry or wet?
        
             | y-curious wrote:
             | Sure :) (this is all publically available, fyi, no trade
             | secrets here)
             | 
             | 8 channel headband with individual gel packets for each
             | electrode. You pop the gel packets and then you have wet
             | electrodes!
             | 
             | The company is called Ceribell; Happy to answer more
             | questions if you have them. We do not sell to individuals,
             | but if you're in the research space, I'm happy to get in
             | touch.
        
       | gorkish wrote:
       | This seems as if it could be cool, but the board is $350 with a
       | BoM of about 50 bucks. Considering the current nascent state of
       | things, this doesn't really feel like a project on a successful
       | path.
        
         | ron_87 wrote:
         | why 50 ?
        
           | _Microft wrote:
           | The Elecrow page says that the analog front end used on the
           | board is a ADS1299. The eight channel version of it is
           | 60EUR+VAT on Digikey. The rest of the parts is most likely
           | very cheap.
        
             | ron_87 wrote:
             | yes, but also ICs for Voltage! I use with the low noise.
             | Also price for PCB board and for soldering and in my case
             | also included software) But anyway I will try make price
             | lower in the near future
        
               | _Microft wrote:
               | The BoM is of course only a small part of the cost and
               | there is lots of work time and prototypes that need to be
               | paid off by selling finished devices. I'm sorry if that
               | sounded like I thought that the price might be too high.
               | Thanks for your efforts!
        
       | mt_ wrote:
       | What are good papers to get started on BCI in tandem with the
       | recent advancements in Large Language Models?
        
         | tbenst wrote:
         | Our preprint does exactly that :).
         | https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05583
        
       | dmarto wrote:
       | There is also the OpenEEG project[0], the boards are way cheaper
       | (sub 100eur[1]) and also they are both open source and open
       | hardware.
       | 
       | [0] - https://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/index.html
       | 
       | [1] - https://www.olimex.com/Products/EEG/OpenEEG/
        
         | ron_87 wrote:
         | is is possible measure EEG with 8 bits ADC ?
        
           | dmarto wrote:
           | With an active electrode, it should be good enough. After
           | all, we are talking about hobby-grade results.
           | 
           | The Olimex ones are 10-bit (supporting both active and
           | passive electrodes), while it's claimed[0] that 12-bit
           | resolution is sufficient for EEG.
           | 
           | However, it's worth noting that there are obvious advantages
           | to the higher resolution.
           | 
           | [0] https://www.biosemi.com/faq/24bitsystem.htm
        
             | ron_87 wrote:
             | EEG in microvolts, if ADC 12 bits, then reference for ADC
             | should be in millivolts
        
               | mlyle wrote:
               | He mentions active probes. Active probes have
               | amplification.
               | 
               | As his link makes clear, your ADC just needs enough
               | resolution to measure the signal when the (amplified)
               | offset voltages don't saturate it.
        
               | ron_87 wrote:
               | yes, I told about digital EEG device from this website.
               | To clarify analog device, I need a little more time
        
           | Kiboneu wrote:
           | I've been wondering about this for a while.... have you
           | tried?
           | 
           | I'm not a EEG designer but I've experimenting and learning
           | about it. Sounds like you make PiEEG? This is really cool and
           | I appreciate the docs on the github.
           | 
           | After amplification, you could get the signal 0-100uV to
           | ~0-Vanalog; so then the entire 8-bit range could ideally be
           | used. Realistically, after filtering, due to roll-off /
           | artifacts one could probably use 3/4ths of that space -- so ~
           | 192 voltage levels that can be determined by the ADC per
           | sample. Does this sound right?
           | 
           | It'd probably depend on what level of control / reliability
           | one would want from the EEG data; I imagine that you could
           | probably cut a lot of corners if, say, you were only
           | measuring for hemispheric coherence in a small set of
           | frequency bands, or stages of REM sleep (and maybe ERPs like
           | p300).
           | 
           | I don't know, this is in my upcoming experiments. Originally
           | this was an attempt to build an EEG amplifier / filter
           | circuit for an atmega328p 10-bit ADC but for my purposes I
           | settled for a 12-bit (and possibly hardware oversampling) on
           | an EFM32.
        
       | QuantumG wrote:
       | Is someone maintaining a big list of BCIs somewhere? If you're
       | going with extra-cranial hardware, I think the best available
       | involves Microwave Brain Stimulation along with passive sensing
       | methods like this. Unidirectional brain -> computer is neat but
       | so long as the feedback is via sight or sound it's just another
       | move-the-mouse alternative.
        
       | ron_87 wrote:
       | Forgot to say, 8 channels now and 16 in the few months
        
       | pedalpete wrote:
       | I was going to point to openBCI as another option, but the
       | definitely are not a low-cost option. I don't remember spending
       | this much on the Cyton board a few years ago.
       | 
       | https://shop.openbci.com/collections/frontpage
        
         | ron_87 wrote:
         | yes, thank you!
        
       | seeknotfind wrote:
       | Anyone recommend particular electrodes for this or have a good
       | comparison with alternatives?
        
       | lukeinator42 wrote:
       | I recently discovered that you can attach an external electrode
       | or two to a Muse headset:
       | https://hackaday.io/project/162169-muse-eeg-headset-making-e....
       | This is a fairly cheap way to hack around with an EEG system that
       | has four electrodes at the front and then an extra electrode you
       | can place anywhere else you want. I think it would probably work
       | pretty well for simple stuff like detecting P300s or SSVEP.
       | 
       | But yeah you definitely get what you pay for with EEG. In the lab
       | I'm in, we have a $150k EGI system and a $40k cognionics system
       | and even the cognionics system is way more glitchy/low quality
       | compared to the more expensive systems.
       | 
       | Also, I wonder what happens safety/electrical noise-wise if
       | you're plugging a raspberry pi into the wall? Generally, EEG
       | systems are either battery-powered or use an isolation
       | transformer. I wonder if it's best to power the pi with a
       | battery.
        
         | MPSimmons wrote:
         | Without some serious fuse/filtering, I don't think I'd feel
         | good about plugging it into the wall. It's easy enough to get a
         | battery pack that can provide enough juice to run this for
         | testing sessions, so why risk it, even if the risk is small?
        
         | ron_87 wrote:
         | only from battery, thank for your message! for details write me
         | here https://www.linkedin.com/in/ildar-rakhmatulin-262a66112/
        
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