
You Don't Have to Be a Scientist to Own a Proper EEG Headset - bootload
https://www.braindecoder.com/open-source-3d-printable-eeg-headset-openbci-kickstarter-1446448451.html
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KingMob
Former neuroscientist here. Used to work with intracranial EEG (electrodes
directly on the brains of epilepsy patients).

This is very cool, and there will definitely be some neat consumer
applications.

But this is not a "proper" headset, compared to lab equipment. Lab equipment
has more electrodes, positioning protocols, and electrode gel. As yoz-y
mentioned, that electrode gel can boost signals by orders of magnitude. Good
luck getting clean gamma signals from a dry electrode. (Power falls off non-
linearly with the frequency, and gamma is the highest frequency we typically
capture with EEG.)

The most likely scientific application of stuff like this is long-
term/ecologically valid recording. E.g., let the user wear this all day with
Google Glass. OTOH, even a small number of dry electrodes should suffice to
train ML algorithms to turn on your computer with your mind.

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melling
They covered a little EEG ON National Geographic's Breakthrough series
(Episode 2):

[http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/breakthrough-
series/vi...](http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/breakthrough-
series/videos/more-than-human)

I don't seem to hear much about this technology. Are we making any real
progress?

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bstamour
When you say real progress, are you referring to the underlying technology
itself, or something else?

With regards to the technology, I'm not sure if there's much more room for
improving EEG itself, it seems like a solved problem (how do we measure
electro-dermal (or brain) activity). However I'm not a neuroscientist, so I
may be off base. Where I do see room for improvement is in systems that can
automatically make sense of the signals we're reading. This requires gaining a
better understanding of the brain, though.

~~~
lloyd-christmas
Relevant to that, there was a kaggle competition a little while ago on
epilepsy using EEGs. The competition/relevant dataset can be found here:
[https://www.kaggle.com/c/seizure-
prediction/data](https://www.kaggle.com/c/seizure-prediction/data)

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dang
Related prior discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8164595](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8164595).

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rmason
Got a friend who is a MS evangelist here in Michigan and actually has done
presentations using an EEG headset and Azure machine learning to build a lie
detector:

[https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Lets-dev-
this/LDT1602](https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Lets-dev-this/LDT1602)

