Would like to know what do you think and for what purpose you are using them.
I believe that the concept itself is very promising, offering great opportunities in the field of BCI and QS.
Unfortunately for what I have understood, the quality of data that can be extracted/obtained by this external non-intrusive devices is still pretty low, so I am doubting their usefulness for the current state of technology.
Still let me know of any thoughts/opinion of yours about this, I am searching for some random input, so I can then eventually dive deeper into the topic.
I have been looking a bit around monitoring EEG while sleeping but there isn’t much in that direction. I mean at an affordable price range. Equipment used in sleep clinic is US$5,000 for the entry price and those should work well, for bed based and/or ambulatory use.
The only “affordable” one I tried is OpenBCI but it is not easy to use for that.
Hi Sagado,
I use the Neurosky headset. I was frustrated with my initial results, until I discovered my unit was defective and replaced it. I had mixed results with the games to improve attention and dropped that approach. I did have success using the headset while doing mindful meditation (Jon Kabat-Zinn: full body scan). I was able to record going into a meditative state (using their meditation output signal). I tried other methods of meditation without seeing any signal above the noise.
The Neurosky headset is too uncomfortable for sleep measurements. I still prefer my Zeo Bedside for that application. I have not looked into working with the raw EEG data from the Zeo.
I have been using MUSE and the Neurosky. You can do more things with the Neurosky like playing games but the scores didn’t make any sense to me. The MUSE is only made for meditation. Currently, I am doing a meditation course where I use the MUSE every day as an assistance tool. I have been meditating with MUSE for two months now and I am grading my perceived quality and compare the scores with the MUSE quality scores. I haven’t done the math but there I think there is some correlation in the scores but it is not a strong correlation.
Furthermore, you definitely can’t use any of these bands you mentioned for tracking your sleep. They are very sensitive to movement, when you move your head or when you open your eyes the data is corrupted by motion artifacts. MUSE has filters to filter these artifacts but we’ll never know how great these filters work. I have done some little tests and it seems like they don’t work perfectly. Plus, as OP_Engr mentioned, it is very uncomfortable to wear them during sleep.
For what I have understood none of the devices I mentioned seem feasible for sleep measurements. Even more important you are saying that they are really sensitive to movements, so no way you can for example track you during the day, let’s say while you bring forth your normal routine at home.
Seems that for now the real appropriate usage is exactly for meditation, or to simply monitor the brain signals in a specific time-frame and setup.
I am currently just exploring the scenario and technology, speculating on possible usages. Apart from ideas like mind dictation and typing, I am simply interested in the option of collecting data about the brain activity, and build stats, suggestions and analysis on top of them.
If you have any more feedback, please let me know.
This thread from another forum has a good overview of available sleep eeg devices. I own the Neuroon and it has promise but my unit was defective, so I can’t speak to the quality of the data.