Development of a Low-cost PC-based Single-channel EEG Acquisition System for Educational and Research Purpose

EEG is a widely used brain recording technique for clinical and research purposes due to its non-invasiveness, user-friendliness and low-cost compared with other brain imaging techniques such as MRI or ECoG. The goal of this work is to build a single channel EEG acquisition and monitoring system for research and education purpose. By using discrete and locally available components, a low-cost analog frontend has been developed for EEG recording at channel Fp1 (prefrontal part of brain) location which can be interfaced with PC through Arduino UNO and can be analyzed in MATLAB platform. EEG is usually very low in amplitude (i.e. uV range) and gets contaminated by noise very easily which makes it challenging to acquire a good quality signal (i.e. good SNR). The single channel EEG recording and monitoring system that is designed and implemented in hardware can be used in various application like moving mouse cursor or build a security system like Face-unlocking. This recorded data can also be helpful for students to understand EEG better for further analysis and processing. The implemented system in hardware costs less than 25 USD whereas the available EEG device price starts from 100+ USD excluding the license cost to access the raw EEG. The developed system is tested and found that it can successfully record the EEG rhythms, especially the Alpha rhythms (dominates around 8–12 Hz frequency) during eye close.