Open-BCI has had their Ganglion board available for years, and it is also open-sourced hardware and software. It's more expensive than the PiEEG, but this probably isn't as new as the headline suggests.
As discussed in a thread a few weeks ago, the hardware often isn't the challenging or expensive part of building a BCI system.
Electrodes and a softgoods system to reliably hold them in place comfortably is a big challenge.
The off the shelf pre-build components are expensive, uncomfortable, and/or unreliable (from our experience).
We're building a sleep wearable EEG headband which monitors sleep state and uses auditory stimulation to increase deep sleep in realtime (https://soundmind.co).
We started by working with the Open-BCI board. It was a good starting point, but once we tried to get it on our heads and sleep with it (not lying next to us on the bed), we needed to move to our own custom hardware.
That was not a big challenge. A month after that decision, we had a custom board.
But electrodes, and keeping electrodes in place, that's where the challenge is. Off the shelf stuff is either uncomfortable and expensive, or not of high enough quality to use in EEG.
We've had to not only design our own electrodes, but also the system to hold them in place comfortably while sleeping.
Many other BCI devices don't have the "sleeping" requirement, but it is still a PITA to get things going on an average users head.
Emotiv (also a local Sydney, Australia company) has some great devices which can be easily used - but I don't think they give direct access to the data.
By all means, people should play with the BCI tech, but just know that if you think you're going to buy a board, and use it in an environment where the person is not very still, you are going to run into lots of issues.
Sounds like you're solving real problems and that your solutions could end up being useful for more than just your target niche of sleep monitoring. Any chance your product will be hackable once it finally hits the market? I'd love it if I could buy an EEG with significant thought put into the design and ease of use and then mess around with the raw data myself!
Our target is not sleep monitoring at all. We are improving the efficiency of deep sleep as a initial use, and the physical and mental health benefits that come from that.
We're not focused on "hackability" atm, but if you look at Emotiv, they have a software platform, as do OpenBCI. Some people have tapped into Muse (I believe).
It seems the EEG units that have offered open APIs have mostly removed them, I'm not sure why.
What sort of "messing around with the data" would you like to do?
We have looked at opening our data to users, but seeing as we are classified as a medical device, there are considerations that there.
I'm an ML researcher and I'm very interested in doing some self-experimentation with training personalized BCI models. My thought is that if all I am the only person using the models, it doesn't matter if the models overfit on my specific brain—in fact, that would be desirable! One application in particular I've thought a lot about is training a model to embed my brain activity in realtime and then using those embeddings to guide a diffusion model as it's generating an image—basically using the EEG to give the diffusion model live feedback during the denoising process. I know EEG isn't super spatially fine-grained, but I'm suspicious that I might be able to get some nifty results. Sort of like RLHF tuning, but on steroids!
Yeah the article makes this one kick starter sound more novel than it is. Not that connections with a Raspberry PI isn't useful, but OpenBCI has been around for almost a decade now.
FWIW I have personally found OpenBCI's hardware to be incredibly useful. An OpenBCI board is basically a set of electrodes with a really good amplifier (and all the software figured out). There are a ton of interesting projects you can kick off with one of these beyond just looking at Brainwaves.
I'm the CTO at Seer Medical, we make a wearable EEG device that's designed to be worn for ~10 days, including during sleep.
Totally agree that the electronics is not the difficult part (battery management, and power consumption aside). Our most loved features are the industrial design and materials science around our electrodes and ways of attaching them to the scalp.
We've designed and built our own electrodes too. Though we don't have to do multi-day, and we're looking for a specific signal during sleep, so probably not as challenging as what you guys are dealing with.
However, as soon as they went out of business the supply of their replacement sensors dried up, that was it.
It must be interesting what you're doing with sleep. I heard a joe rogan episode where someone used a system like that and it seems like he went right to sleep.
We don't do anything with sleep latency (time to fall asleep). There is nothing I have seen in research that suggests it is possible to reduce time to sleep with auditory stimulation.
That doesn't stop other people from trying to sell into that space.
We're focused on improving the efficiency of deep sleep specifically, and the many physical and mental health benefits that come from that. A portion of that research is posted on our website https://soundmind.co/research
Our boards and electrodes are not publicly available. We are still in development. Our product is also a product, we are not selling our boards or electrodes independently.
As discussed in a thread a few weeks ago, the hardware often isn't the challenging or expensive part of building a BCI system.
Electrodes and a softgoods system to reliably hold them in place comfortably is a big challenge.
The off the shelf pre-build components are expensive, uncomfortable, and/or unreliable (from our experience).
We're building a sleep wearable EEG headband which monitors sleep state and uses auditory stimulation to increase deep sleep in realtime (https://soundmind.co).
We started by working with the Open-BCI board. It was a good starting point, but once we tried to get it on our heads and sleep with it (not lying next to us on the bed), we needed to move to our own custom hardware.
That was not a big challenge. A month after that decision, we had a custom board.
But electrodes, and keeping electrodes in place, that's where the challenge is. Off the shelf stuff is either uncomfortable and expensive, or not of high enough quality to use in EEG.
We've had to not only design our own electrodes, but also the system to hold them in place comfortably while sleeping.
Many other BCI devices don't have the "sleeping" requirement, but it is still a PITA to get things going on an average users head.
Emotiv (also a local Sydney, Australia company) has some great devices which can be easily used - but I don't think they give direct access to the data.
By all means, people should play with the BCI tech, but just know that if you think you're going to buy a board, and use it in an environment where the person is not very still, you are going to run into lots of issues.