Hi there - I’m starting a habit of practicing mediation and am interested to see how various biometrics change over time (both in the micro: before I meditate, while I meditate, after I meditate mediation practice, and macro: how those numbers change over time). I have an eye towards hooking that data up to some “real world” outputs but the form is still pretty loose in my head. Some of the metrics I’m interested in measuring are vagal tone (acceptable proxies are heart rate variability, but if someone else knows off other proxies that can be measured with diy or commercial devices, I’m open to that too), mood, and brain waves.
I know a lot of different devices exist on the market for each of these things (a simple Google search can attest), however I can’t find anything which compares different monitors for what they measure, compatible technologies, possible output formats, price, etc… Do any of you have any suggestions for where I could find a resource which compares different monitors across various dimensions?
Cool! I’m also tracking EEG during mindfulness meditation.
At the moment, there’s not really anything available that would provide usable metrics related to meditation. Maybe it’s a good idea to just record raw data for now. I’ll be happy to share my analysis methods once I get around to analysis. (I’m only tracking raw data at the moment.)
Something like this? It’s about “consumer brain computer interfaces”, but includes most available EEG based devices.
Personally, I own three truesense devices, a 6 chan OpenEEG and an older mobile medical grade device (which is also an option via ebay). (Not a single consumer EEG, so I can’t say much about these.) If you’re on a budget, get the truesense kit. Otherwise, probably also get the truesense kit, just to be really sure. Also, most people I’ve talked to who tried it didn’t find the Neurosky devices to be of much use, so don’t get one of these.
The truesense has a couple of advantages in that it’s tiny and you can easily couple a few devices to use at once. Also: it can record ECG too, so you can extract HRV from the raw data using whichever algorithm you like…
