Development and Characterization of a Dry Ear-EEG Sensor With a Generic Flexible Earpiece
Hongyu Liang, Yongxuan Wang, Honghui Li, Yuying Wang, Peter Liu, Rong Liu
Abstract
While the sensors of current EEG wearables can be miniaturized such that they can be fit into an in-ear hearable device, the brain monitoring based on the state-of-art ear-EEG techniques has several drawbacks such as customization for one individual, time-consuming fabrication process and short life cycle. To deal with this problem, a new method to design a sensor with one channel dry electrode embedded in a generic substrate is proposed. The electrical characterizations were evaluated with 15 subjects and five EEG paradigms, in which ear-EEG and conventional scalp EEG was recorded simultaneously. Recordings from the generic dry-contact ear-EEG sensor were compared to conventional scalp EEG recordings. Reliable responses were extracted from the ear-EEG for different paradigms, albeit weaker in amplitude than from scalp EEG. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the designed generic ear-EEG sensor and its potential to achieve sustained, ease-of-use, cost-effective and off-the-shelf ear-EEG recording use.