Brain Anatomy

The next color pictures show the brain anatomy with Frontal, Parietal, Occipital and Temporal lobes. It also describes some of the brain activity areas as Vision, Speech, Voluntary motor function, Hearing and Higher mental functions.

These pictures were taken from a Medical Legal Art video.


For more informations about BCI/EEG press here.

EPOC EEG System

EMOTIV has developed a new wireless BCI with 14 sensors and a lithium battery with 12 hours of autonomy. It comes with Emokey that converts detected events into a combination of keystrokes running behind existing applications or games.

There's no need for keystroke combinations, simply smile or focus on a command and your applications respond. For example, combining Emotiv EPOC with a smartphone offers unique opportunities to capture brain imaging data reflecting our everyday social behavior in a mobile context, allowing for modeling the mental state of users as well as providing a basis for novel bio-feedback applications.

The EPOC SDKs have 4 different editions (developer, research, enterprise and education) and the price goes from $500 to $2500. "Mind reading images and reconstructing the neural sources", "An experimentation and mind-reading application for the Emotiv EPOC" and "P-300 Rhythm Detection Using ANFIS Algorithm and Wavelet Feature Extraction in EEG Signals" are some of the published papers related to Emotiv.


This system has different applications that can be used to read EEG:

• Emotiv EPOC Brain Activity Map displays a real-time map of your mental activity with adjustable gain that allows to see detailed information and relative strengths between different brain regions. The price is $9.95 and is compatible with the Emotiv EPOC headset and SDK developer and research headsets.

• Emotiv EPOC 3D Brain Activity Map has custom band definition, record and play back sessions, 3D surface models for each band and EEG and FFT views. 

This application costs $79.95 but is only available to Research, Education and Enterprise licenses.

Smartphone Brain Scanner

From a raw EEG data obtained with a wireless Emotiv 14 channel Neuroheadset the DTU Informatics from Technical University of Denmark made a EEG monitoring system where a smartphone provides a touch-based interface with real-time brain state decoding and 3D reconstruction.

The headset transmits the EEG data to a receiver module connected to a Smartphone. The delay between the signal appearing in the headset and being visualized on the screen depends on the used source reconstruction window and is between 130 and 150 msec for 8Hz visualization. The framerate of the visualization (realized in OpenGL) is around 30fps.

The Smart Brain Scanner provides a portable EEG system based in a real-time functional brain scanner including stimulus delivery, data acquisition, logging, brain state decoding and 3D activity visualization.

Playing Chess By Thinking

Dr. Michael Tangermann from the Berlin Institute of Technology (Technische Universität Berlin) explain how the player can moves the chess pieces across a board by thinking only.

Out of the 64 electrodes in the cap, he activates 14 which measure brain activity in key areas which detects which piece the person intends to move. It’s an intricate task and the cap must be fitted precisely for accurate readings. As soon as the cap is fitted, a system calibrates the software in order to recognise the specific traits of the player’s brain activity. The brain chess computer is just the tip of the iceberg and the technology could have serious medical implications, improving patients’ lives for the TOBI project is all about helping patients with severe motor neurone diseases communicate with the outside world.

This project was launched in November 2008 with the help of a European Union fund of thousands of dollars called TOBI - “Tools for Brain controlled interaction” and it costed.

Show Your Mood Reading EEG

The Japanese company Neurowear is selling a funny gadget that shows your mood. With the help of brainwaves and biosensors they have created a new kind of human organ. The next video shows how it can be used to change your social relations, not virtually but in real life, providing a first contact.

Necomimi has a headband with two ears and based on EEG they stand up each time the user is concentrated or see something interesting.

Smart Cap Using EEG

SmartCap is an innovator product made by EdanSafe from CRC-Mining Group in Australia that uses EEG to read if a worker is tired. This operator fatigue monitor system can inform the SmartCap user immediately showing is tired level in a small monitor or it can send this information to the cloud to be remotely analyzed.

The measurements are made in real time so it can reduce the occurrence of incidents. The fatigue algorithm has been independently validated by an Australian University and an accredited Sleep Centre.

BCI Europe Research Links

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne - Multimedia Signal Processing Group, Graz University of Technolog - Institute for Knowledge Discovery and Technical University of Denmark - Dep. of Informatics and  Mathematical Modelling are some of the most important institutes in Europe that makes BCI research.


École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne - MultiMedia Signal Processing Group  

The Multimedia Signal Processing Group is headed by Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland. The group is active in research and teaching in the field of multimedia signal processing. Research topics span over three highly interconnected disciplines of multimedia signal processing, namely multimedia coding, multimodal processing, analysis and interpretation, and media security.

• Research Activities
• Participation to Scientific Networks
• PhD in Progress

Graz University of Technology - Institute for Knowledge Discovery   

The BCI Lab is one of the leading labs in brain-computer communication. It is an internationally renowned research institution with a research focus on brain-computer communication and dynamics of brain oscillations. More specifically, the lab has extensive expertise in EEG recording, offline and online processing of brain signals and biosignals in general, feature extraction, detection and classification of brain patterns, and neurofeedback systems.

• Research
• Publications
• Downloads

Technical University of Denmark - Dep. of Informatics and  Mathematical Modelling  

milab is a laboratory at the Cognitive Systems Section at DTU Informatics offering an environment for research and teaching in the areas of mobile context awareness, media modeling, and user experiences. Advanced mobile phones and internet tablets are available for application prototype development and experiments, along with a set of useful tools.

• Research
• Demos 
• Tools

Open Source Software For EEG

This message shows 3 open-source software for EEG analysis from a number of developers that have contributed to the OpenEEG community under free licenses.

First we have the OpenVibe, the open-source software for BCIs created by a consortium of academic and industrial partners. As written in their site:

"(...) The aim of the OpenViBE consortium was to develop open-source software for brain-computer interfaces, which is expected to promote and accelerate research, development and deployment of BCI technology. Key features of the resulting software are its modularity, its high performance, its multiple-users facilities and its connection with high-end virtual reality displays. (...)"

This software can run under Windows and Linux and it have a user-friendly graphical language to design a BCI without writing any line of code. It have also the possibility to use a set of software modules written in C++.

The second software is BrainBay that allows the graphical design for realtimeprocessing, display, storage and visual and acoustic feedback of biosignals and is being developed by Christoph Veigl and Jeremy Wilkerson. 

It supports Human-Computer-Interface functions and the NeuroServer Software Framework to transmit live recordings via Internet / LAN.

Finally the third software named BioEra. It have a visual designer that can be used to analyse signals in real time. The manufacturer says:

"(...) BioEra provides environment and tools to create various types of processing tasks. It can be used for research, games, self exploration, entrainment, sound processing and many others. Each task is contained in a design. To create a design no programming skill is required, only understanding of the process and its requirements.(...)"

The BioEra free version has all features available in BioEra Pro, but after 2 weeks since installation the design can be started only for 1 minute at a time.

For more informations about BCI/EEG press here.

EEG Frequency Bands

EEG waveforms are generally classified according to their frequency, amplitude and shape, as well as the location on the scalp at which they are recorded: 

• 0.5 - 3   Hz: Delta  = Deep Sleep
•    4 - 7   Hz: Theta = Light Sleep
•    8 - 13 Hz: Alpha = Awake and Relaxed
•  14 - 30 Hz: Beta   = Awake and Excited

The next table shows the location and state associated to the most familiar classification used for EEG waveform frequency.

For more informations about BCI/EEG press here.

EEG Animation Using Interactive Matlab Toolbox

The next video shows the result of time/frequency analysis, artifact rejection, and other functions using EEGLAB made by Zeynep Akalin Acar at the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience.
The color scale is red for '+', blue for '-' and green for '0'.

The speed of this animation is one fifth real time so it is easy to understand the challenge facing the scientific community to identify patterns of behavior.

EEG Recordings Of Control And Alcoholic Subjects

The next images shows the difference between two EEG data acquisition from a control and a alcoholic subjects.

This study was made by Henri Begleiter at the Neurodynamics Laboratory at the State University of New York Health Center at Brooklyn.

Welcome To My Blog

This is the first message in my blog.As a PhD researcher in Biomedical Engineering I hope to contribute in the next years with new information and knowledge to the scientific community.