Comparison of an open-hardware electroencephalography amplifier with medical grade device in brain-computer interface applications
This work addresses the high cost barrier for BCI hardware dissemination, offering a practical alternative for broader accessibility, though it is incremental as it compares existing devices.
The study compared the consumer-grade OpenBCI EEG amplifier with a medical-grade device in brain-computer interface tasks, finding that OpenBCI provided close EEG readings and classification accuracy suitable for popularizing BCI uses, though the medical-grade equipment still outperformed it.
Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are promising communication devices between humans and machines. BCI based on non-invasive neuroimaging techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) have many applications , however the dissemination of the technology is limited, in part because of the price of the hardware. In this paper we compare side by side two EEG amplifiers, the consumer grade OpenBCI and the medical grade g.tec g.USBamp. For this purpose, we employed an original montage, based on the simultaneous recording of the same set of electrodes. Two set of recordings were performed. During the first experiment a simple adapter with a direct connection between the amplifiers and the electrodes was used. Then, in a second experiment, we attempted to discard any possible interference that one amplifier could cause to the other by adding "ideal" diodes to the adapter. Both spectral and temporal features were tested -- the former with a workload monitoring task, the latter with an visual P300 speller task. Overall, the results suggest that the OpenBCI board -- or a similar solution based on the Texas Instrument ADS1299 chip -- could be an effective alternative to traditional EEG devices. Even though a medical grade equipment still outperforms the OpenBCI, the latter gives very close EEG readings, resulting in practice in a classification accuracy that may be suitable for popularizing BCI uses.