This document provides an outline for a presentation on personal EEG devices. It begins with a primer on regular EEG use in medical diagnostics. It then discusses the mechanisms behind how EEG works and current applications. The document outlines limitations of current personal EEG devices and introduces Introspect, a new portable personal EEG device in development. Potential uses of Introspect are then discussed, including applications in epilepsy monitoring, mood tracking, neurofeedback, sleep analysis, and research. The document concludes that EEG's future lies in portability and Introspect could enable many promising new applications.

1. Personal Neuro Devices Inc.

2. Outline
1) Regular EEG – basic primer
2) Mechanisms behind EEG – how it works
3) Current uses of EEG
4) Future direction of EEG
5) Current state of personal EEG, and its
limitations
6) Demo of personal EEG device
7) Introspect (portable personal EEG)
8) Potential uses of Introspect
9) Conclusion (and summary)

3. 1) Regular EEG – basic
primerfor
 Device
determining what
areas on the surface
of the brain are
displaying activity
 Uses electrodes
placed around the
scalp to pick up
electrical activity
produced by
neurons in the brain
 Action potentials

4. Action potential

5. 2) Mechanisms behind EEG: how it
works  Neurons always produce
electrical activity
 When excited, neural
membrane transport proteins
pump ions through cell
membrane
 Biggest effect in action potential
 Released ions then push
nearby ions in extracellular
fluid
 Continues indefinitely, in waves
 These waves eventually reach
the scalp, where they can be
detected through their magnetic
A membrane transport protein “push” on the metal of the
electrodes
 Called volume conduction

6. 3) Current uses of EEG
 Medical diagnostics in a
lab or clinic
 Epilepsy
 Brain death testing
 Sleep disorders
 Photosensitivity
 ADHD
 Narcolepsy
 Various brain cancers Coma patient being tested for brain
 Encephalitis death

7. Current uses of EEG
 Continuous
monitoring for
seizures in ICU
 Depth of
anaesthesia
monitoring
 Evaluation of head
injuries
 Finds white matter
damage
EEG bispectral index monitor for monitoring  Finds brain regions
brain activity during surgery that have become
isolated

8. Current uses of EEG
 Neurofeedback
 Patients trained to
directly alter their
EEG output
 Still experimental
 Used to a small
degree for epilepsy,
depression,
addictive disorders,
and anxiety
 Primarily used for
treating ADHD
○ Easiest use, as beta
waves are strongly
associated with
attention
EEG wave patterns, from top to bottom: beta, alpha,
theta, stage 2 sleep, and delta (stage 4 sleep)

9. Example of a neurofeedback game tailored to young children with ADHD

10. Current uses of EEG
 Brain function research, when some or all of the following are
required:
 High temporal resolution – allows for study of the stages of brain processing,
rather than just the activity that results at the end of a task
 Study of subjects unable to give direct responses
 Monitoring of sleep
 Longer-term monitoring than is feasible with fMRI
 Study in an environment other than a clinic or lab
EEG in use at a sleep lab

11. 4) Future direction of EEG
 MEG is considerably
better than EEG for
most of EEG’s current
uses
 Cost and device size is
all that prevents MEG
from entirely supplanting A magnetoencephalography
EEG for these particular (MEG) device
purposes, but this is
dropping

12. Future direction of EEG
 However, MEG is not
the end for EEG
 Not every use of EEG
can be replaced by
MEG
 Also, two new major
directions EEG is
currently taking that no
other existing
neuroimaging
MEG could never be used in technique could go:
research like this ○ Personal neuroimaging
○ Portable neuroimaging

13. 5) Personal EEG
 EEG has become
more accessible to the
general public in
recent years
Mindflex
 Much lower quality than
professional equipment
○ However, other
advantages I can lift a ball! $100 well spent.
 Most simply use EEG
as a component in
certain toys and games
○ Jedi Force Trainer
○ Mindflex

14. Mindflex

15. Personal EEG
 3 companies making
programmable EEG
platforms - primarily for
the purpose of brain-
computer interfacing,
each with one major
device on the market
 Neurosky’s Think-Gear
○ Simple device for lay Neurosky’s Think-gear
public and software
developers
○ 6 electrodes

16. Personal EEG
 OCZ Technology’s
Neural Impulse
Actuator
○ Weakest of the
customizable
commercial BCI
headsets
○ Only 3 electrodes
○ Not really
EEG, though
marketed as such
Neural Impulse Actuator

17. Neural Impulse Actuator in use

18. Personal EEG
 Emotiv Inc.’s EPOC
Neuroheadset
○ More advanced
 16 electrodes
○ Still a BCI
○ Still primarily for
games and software
○ However, more
conducive to
therapeutic
Paraplegic using Emotiv to move wheelchair applications

19. 6) Limitations of current personal
EEG
 Complete focus on
brain-controllers,
rather than gaining
information about the
user
 Lose connection
easily
 Not really portable
 Small number of
For the look that screams “don’t
electrodes bother talking, I’m reading your
 Clunky thoughts directly”, why not pick
up a Neurosky Mindset?

20. Personal Neuro Devices:
Introspect

21. 7) Introspect
 Will be commercially
available
 Lower cost
 Marketed to public
 Truly portable
 Active electrodes
○ Improves resolution,
sensitivity, resistance to
movement noise
 Exterior mesh that clips to
a series of hats
○ Hiring fashion design
company to make For all you know, Indiana Jones
catalogue of hats to fit over
could be wearing a portable
Introspect
EEG device

22. Introspect
 Level of sensitivity
equivalent to Emotiv
 Modified 10-20 electrode
placement system
 Open-source API
 Applications open to
creation by outside
developers
 Easier to hydrate
electrodes
 Will run tubes through arms
attaching to electrodes;
pressing pump will transport
10-20 system
fluid to back of electrode
pads – will soak through

23. How active electrode system works – stepwise (very simplified):
1) Removes noise caused by circuits themselves
2) Ups voltage of incoming signals in relation to one another (multiplies differences
between nearby electrode inputs) – makes signal larger without distorting waveform
3) Rejects all wavelengths known not to be associated with EEG information (which
represent some sort of noise)
4) Microcontroller in electrode transmits binary data corresponding to wave inputs
5) Base unit receives signal, and sends it through USB to the portable device

24. 8) Potential uses - Epilepsy
 Epilepsy
 Advance seizure detection
○ Prevention of secondary injuries
○ Stop seizure before it hits
 Early drug administration, IE midazolam
 Electrical stimulation
○ Effective algorithms already exist
 Autoregressive models and support vector
machines Midazolam – the most
- Can get 100% sensitivity, low false alarm popular emergency
rate antiepileptic
Schematic representation of combined SVM and
AR model seizure prediction system

25. Importance of being in a safe location and position when a
seizure begins

26. Potential uses - Epilepsy
 Assess severity of
seizure
○ Automatically contact
emergency services if
over a certain severity
level [check-in sys]
 Track quantity of
seizures, pre-seizure
states, and potential
triggering factors
○ Would allow
elimination of Emotional stress is implicated in 30-
66% of seizures reported by epileptics
triggering factors
○ [life-tracking software; diet, etc info;
find trigs]

27. Potential uses - stroke
Tissue plasminogen
activator – protein
stucture [clot-breaker;
admin alot kills stroke clot]
 Advance detection of strokes
 Early detection massively mitigates damage caused by
strokes
○ Administering tissue plasminogen activators within the first 3
hours will dissolve the stroke-inducing clot, immediately
stopping the stroke
 Minimizes brain damage
 Monitoring could be done on high-risk populations [geriat pops]

28. Potential uses – Mood-tracking
 Algorithms to detect mood from
EEG signals already exist
 Currently a bit weak, but ever-
improving [*SVN, algorithms]
 Use in bipolar disorder,
depression
 Self-report method already used
○ NIMH Life Chart
○ Adjective Mood Scale
○ Etc.
 Used in:
○ Diagnosis [always low=depr; high pers=BP]
○ Symptom management
 Insight, prep, meds
 Automating mood tracking
would increase adherence, and
remove the potential
confounding factors inherent in
a self-rating system Mood-tracking graph from Introspect
software demo [*Impr]

29. Potential uses –
Neurofeedback
 As discussed earlier, potentially a useful treatment
for a variety of mental disorders
 Especially ADHD
 Increase opportunity for neurofeedback
 Huge hurdles to using the therapy: number of required
sessions and cost
 Portable device could allow patients to do neurofeedback
daily on their own, incr rate of progress [& cost]
 Could allow incorporation of neurofeedback into
daily life
 Small alarms to inform user of problematic thought
patterns, excessive anxiety states, wandering attention,
etc. [Caveat: effective?]
 Neurofeedback when walking or waiting
○ Possibly more persistent benefits if done as a daily exercise?

30. Potential uses - sleep
 Will allow daily tracking
of sleep quantity and
quality
 Sleep quality detection
algorithms are at a
relatively high level
 Already similar commercial
products
○ Sleeptracker, Zeo Personal
Sleep Coach, etc.
 Advantage of Introspect: it
Zeo Personal Sleep Coach
will integrate it with other
functions
○ Search for relationships
between sleep quality and
levels of attention, mood,
anxiety, etc.;

31. Potential uses - sleep
 Could aid in diagnosis of:
○ Sleep disorders
○ Mental disorders that
involve sleep disruptions
 Will also include
neurofeedback
application to help
chronic insomnia
sufferers train their
thinking to help induce
sleep
○ However, more evidence
required
Chronic insomnia

32. Potential uses - research
 The list of mental
phenomena that could be
examined by a portable EEG
device is endless:
 Formation of autobiographical
memories – this is impossible in
the lab
 Minute-to-minute fluctuations in
mood in those with mental and
neurological disorders, and in
the general population
 Naturalistic social interaction,
outside the artificial constraints
inherent in social research in
the lab Autobiographical memory formation could
easily be studied in this circumstance with a
 Average level of activation of portable EEG device
particular areas of the brain on
a day-to-day basis
 etc.

33. Potential uses - research
 It could also determine the external validity of
laboratory and clinic-based EEG research
 Combined with studies correlating EEG with fMRI,
MEG and PET activity, it could determine the
external validity of the entire field of neuroimaging
A combined fMRI-EEG device

34. 9) In conclusion...
 EEG’s future value lies in its portability
 As its price drops, MEG likely to slowly replace EEG for all uses
requiring no portability
 Many potential uses for portable EEG
 Advance seizure and stroke detection
 Tracking of mood disorders
 Neurofeedback that can be done on a daily basis and
incorporated into day-to-day life
 Tracking of sleep quality and quantity that can be used in
conjunction with other measures for diagnostic purposes, and for
the treatment of sleep disorders
 Diagnosis of multiple mental disorders
 Research
 EEG technology in the process of being commercialized
 Multiple consumer EEG devices already released – IE Emotiv,
Neurosky
 Thus, the time is right for the release of a portable
consumer EEG device
 Currently in development by Personal Neuro Devices, under the
working title Introspect

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