Low Cost Instrumentation and Interface for Neural Recordings
Open Access
- Author:
- Jain, Ankit
- Graduate Program:
- Electrical Engineering
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- September 07, 2011
- Committee Members:
- Bruce Gluckman, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Kenneth Jenkins, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Julio Urbina, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Kultegin Aydin, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Insoo Kim, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor - Keywords:
- low cost
EEG
instrumentation
brain computer interface
biomedical
medical device
ADS1298
MSP430. - Abstract:
- According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than one billion people around the globe are affected by neurological disorders. Neurological disorders include epilepsy, migraine, and autism, and neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and neuropsychiatric disorders including depression and personality disorders. Neurological disorders affect people irrespective of their country of origin, country of residence, age, and sex. As the average life expectancy around the globe increases, and the population increases neurological disorders are estimated to grow multiple times their current number. The adult human brain weighs about 3 pounds and contains some 100 billion neurons. Any dysfunctioning of these neurons could create problems and create a neurological disorder. Scientists and engineers are trying to understand the brain using various medical imaging techniques and better understand how the brain works and how any dysfunctioning can be prevented or overcome. Over the years different forms of medical imaging have been developed to understand the complex human brain. The Electroencephalogram (EEG) is one of imaging techniques for spontaneous recording of the electrical activity from the brain. The EEG has been used widely for clinical purposes for diagnosing brain death, coma, monitoring the depth of anesthesia, localizing the regions of abnormalities in the brain. EEG is also widely used in research for cognitive and brain-state studies in psychology, neuroprosthetics, human factors, transportation safety and neuroeconomics. Current EEG acquisition systems are bulky and expensive. This thesis fits within an effort to produce a very high performance EEG recording amplifier that will serve three overlapping efforts at the Penn State Center for Neural Engineering: to produce a low cost video-EEG system for use in the third world, to produce a low-enough cost EEG recording platform for distribution in classroom brain computer interface or another EEG related courses, and to develop flexible high performance instrumentation for ongoing neural recordings in animal studies. A new low cost 8 channel EEG acquisition hardware has been developed which can record EEG data with high fidelity and whose component costs run less than a $100(USD) with of order 10 components. This system can be easily extended to a 16 channel or a 24 channel with just a few changes in the hardware and firmware design. My work has involved the development of the firmware code for the hardware. Different varieties of tests have been conducted to compare the performance of the prototype system with the standard clinical grade system and demonstrated its applicability using the well-known P300 paradigm for a Brain Computer Interface application. The above results prove that the prototype amplifier can serve as a low cost teaching tool and research tool.