Ultra-portable Brain Scanner
Scientists have been striving to understand the inner workings of the human brain for some centuries now. The 20th century came with some realizations, but still, the human mind and brain remain. However, things are evolving much faster with the advent of the new century. One of the latest technologies that will help decipher the mysteries of the human brain comes from Asia and presents itself as a baseball cap.
The device was designed by a research team in Taiwan as a bio-signal monitoring system, and the team managed to squeeze it inside a baseball cap. The system is wireless and ultra-portable, being able to process data and provide real time feedback. The cap is actually monitoring high-temporal resolution brain dynamics without requiring conductive gels applied to the scalp. Li-Wei Ko from National Chiao-Tung University explains that this system has online EEG signal acquisition and real-time signal processing. It can be employed in many situations, but for the moment, the researchers just applied it to driving tasks in this work, such as recurring drowsiness.
The Taiwanese researchers further explain that by measuring EEG signals, the system can monitor an individual’s physiological and cognitive states. The system takes advantage of advances in sensor and information technology to achieve reduced power consumption and production costs. For the time being, the system can operate for about two days before the lithium-ion battery needs to be recharged, but this is just the prototype phase and improvements will surely be made.
In order to scan for brain activity, the system contains five embedded dry electrodes on the forehead part of the cap, and one electrode behind the left ear. All 6 electrodes are set to acquire EEG signals. Then, the EEG signals are wirelessly transmitted to a data receiver, where they are processed in real-time by a dual-core processor.
Apart from the medical benefits of the system, the researchers also expect it to have applications in controlling household electronics devices, which has previously been investigated for physically disabled individuals.
