Re: [Openeeg-list] Status EEG problems/techniques?

[Chip A. <we...@cr...>]

In reply to Jay...

I think that your hopes for scalp-recorded EEG signals to correlate with "intention" is beyond the current state of the art.  If you are willing to embed your EEG electrodes in the cortex itself, you may have more luck.  But from the scalp, there just is just too much blurring from you skull and skin.  My understanding is that the exploitation of scale-recorded EEG signals is not to the sophistication that you're hoping for.

The closest thing to detecting "intention" that I'm aware of is the detection of "Mu Waves", which are associated with your motor centers.  The Mu Waves appear and disappear in different parts of your brain (as seen from your scalp) based on moving different parts of your body.  The most interesting part is that the Mu waves will appear or disappear just by *thinking* about moving those parts of the body.  Now that's pretty cool.

If you're interest in learning more about these signals and what kind of software might be required to detect them, you can google for "Mu Waves" or "Mu Rhythms", or you can check out my own recent tests to detect them on my head...

http://eeghacker.blogspot.com/2013/10/finding-my-mu-waves.html

If you want to try it for yourself, the OpenEEG hardware for Olimex should do the job, though only with two EEG channels.  It is not very expensive and it is definitely sufficient to get started (though, IMO, their electrodes are not very good).  If you out-grow the two channel system, the OpenBCI project that I'm associated with will enable 8 channels of EEG, which would allow you to exploit more spatial information to get a better view as to what's happening in your head.

Good luck,

Chip


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Message: 5
Date: Sun, 3 Nov 2013 11:29:59 -0800
From: Makorihi <mak...@gm...>
Subject: [Openeeg-list] Status EEG problems/techniques?
To: ope...@li...
Message-ID:
        <CAC...@ma...>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Hey all,

I have heard about EEG throughout my life and I find it to be extremely
interesting and have a wide range of implications if the technology
advances further, but I realize that I have no knowledge as to the details
of problems and hurdles people are facing in the field. I was hoping that
someone on this list would have enough knowledge about this field to answer
some of my questions or at least send me in the right direction.

For one, I know that both the hardware and software have their own issues.
Various different types of electrodes exist as well as different methods of
amplifying the signals in preparation for processing. I'm not as interested
in the hardware as I am in the 'software', or more accurately the methods
used to transform these voltages from signal domain into other spaces (such
as inferring complex 'actions' or decoding sight).

What I am really wondering is how far have we come in this respect? Of
course there are well known products such as Emotiv, but I am more
interested in tackling the problem and coming up with a better solution
than just buying some premade device. An in order to do so, I feel like I
need some background knowledge and need to know where we stand today. I was
hoping you guys could help me out with that!

Just as a start, are there any papers in temporal correlation of different
regions of the brain with respect to intention to action? The closest thing
I have found to that is 'Detection of self-paced reaching movement
intention from EEG signals' by Eileen Lew et all. (
http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/178379/files/LewChSiMi12.pdf) But sadly,
they did not tackle the particular thing I am interested in.

Best Regards,
Jay