OpenSync: An opensource platform for synchronizing multiple measures in neuroscience experiments
This provides a free and flexible tool for neuroscientists to integrate multimodal data, addressing a domain-specific bottleneck in experimental design.
The paper tackles the technical complexity and cost of synchronizing multiple behavioral and physiological measures in neuroscience experiments by introducing OpenSync, an open-source platform that achieves microsecond resolution synchronization across various data sources.
Background: The human mind is multimodal. Yet most behavioral studies rely on century-old measures such as task accuracy and latency. To create a better understanding of human behavior and brain functionality, we should introduce other measures and analyze behavior from various aspects. However, it is technically complex and costly to design and implement the experiments that record multiple measures. To address this issue, a platform that allows synchronizing multiple measures from human behavior is needed. Method: This paper introduces an opensource platform named OpenSync, which can be used to synchronize multiple measures in neuroscience experiments. This platform helps to automatically integrate, synchronize and record physiological measures (e.g., electroencephalogram (EEG), galvanic skin response (GSR), eye-tracking, body motion, etc.), user input response (e.g., from mouse, keyboard, joystick, etc.), and task-related information (stimulus markers). In this paper, we explain the structure and details of OpenSync, provide two case studies in PsychoPy and Unity. Comparison with existing tools: Unlike proprietary systems (e.g., iMotions), OpenSync is free and it can be used inside any opensource experiment design software (e.g., PsychoPy, OpenSesame, Unity, etc., https://pypi.org/project/OpenSync/ and https://github.com/moeinrazavi/OpenSync_Unity). Results: Our experimental results show that the OpenSync platform is able to synchronize multiple measures with microsecond resolution.