Earable Design Analysis for Sleep EEG Measurements

Adjunct ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (UbiComp/ISWC), pp. 171–175

Abstract

Conventional EEG devices cannot be used in everyday life and hence, past decade research has been focused on Ear-EEG for mobile, at-home monitoring for various applications ranging from emotion detection to sleep monitoring. As the area available for electrode contact in the ear is limited, the electrode size and location play a vital role for an Ear-EEG system. In this investigation, we present a quantitative study of ear-electrodes with two electrode sizes at different locations in a wet and dry configuration. Electrode impedance scales inversely with size and ranges from 450 kΩ to 1.29 MΩ for dry and from 22 kΩ to 42 kΩ for wet contact at 10 Hz. For any size, the location in the ear canal with the lowest impedance is ELE (Left Ear Superior), presumably due to increased contact pressure caused by the outer-ear anatomy. The results can be used to optimize signal pickup and SNR for specific applications. We demonstrate this by recording sleep spindles during sleep onset with high quality (5.27 μVrms).

Authors 5

1. Swati Mandekar Aachen

   FH Aachen

   Affiliation as printed

   FH Aachen and IDUN Technologies AG, Germany

2. Lina Jentsch

   ETH Zurich

   Affiliation as printed

   ETH Zurich, Switzerland

3. Kai Lutz
   Affiliation as printed

   IDUN Technologies AG, Switzerland

4. Mehdi Behbahani Aachen

   FH Aachen

   Affiliation as printed

   FH Aachen, Germany

5. Mark Melnykowycz
   Affiliation as printed

   IDUN Technologies AG, Switzerland