Peter Gamma (Physiologist & Director) Meditation Research Institute Switzerland (MRIS)

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Issues of OpenBCI Cyton & how these can be resolved

Posted bypg@petergamma.org

Last Updated on December 13, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

OpenBCI Cyton is more affordable than an iWorx TA 220 recorder or Schiller Medilog AR12 Plus Holter Recorder (see the following comparison table):

90.02 Research & medical grade ECG devices which some of those were used to study the accuracy of consumer grade HRMs in different papers

But OpenBCI Cyton has some issues which are listed by Robert Oostenveld on his blog. Oostenveld is Associate Principal Investigator at Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in Nijmegen, the Netherlands:

OpenBCI issues discovered by Robert Oostenveld Associate Principal Investigator at Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in Nijmegen, the Netherlands

Issues

  1. “The connectivity with the dongle is not so stable, sometimes requiring multiple attempts to connect, resetting the board, replugging the dongle, etc.“

comments of the MRIS:

  • this for us personally no reason to to choose OpenBCI for ECG.
  • Instead of a Bluetooth dongle the WIFI shield can be chosen, which has some issues was well but these can be resolved.
  • There are sellers who offer Cyton modules with a WIFI shield and they write in the documentation that these issues with the WIFI shield are resolved.

2. “The Cyton exposes a lot of details of the Ti-ASD1299 chip, which makes it difficult to make the right choice in configuring the board and hence increases the risk of a suboptimal or incorrect configuration.“

comments of the MRIS:

  • as mentioned by Robert Oostenveld this problem can be solved.

3. The technical documentation and design of the PCB has some errors (on SRB1/SRB2), which don’t matter if you only care about getting “some signal” but which cause polarity to be flipped”

comments of the MRIS:

  • SRB1 is the top SRB pin of OpenBCI Cyton which can be seen here:

https://docs.openbci.com/GettingStarted/Biosensing-Setups/EEGSetup/

  • This issue needs to be investigated, but seems not to be a major problem so that OpenBCI cannot be used.
  • We now have two validation papers for OpenBCI, one for ECG and one for ECG
  • Would these papers have been written if OpenBCI Cyton cannot be used for ECG or EEG?

4. “The wifi shield only works sporadically and hence cannot be relied on“

comments of the MRIS:

  • The issues of the WIFI shield can be resolved by a hardware change, this has been described in our journal.
  • Some sellers offer OpenBCI Cyton with a WFI shield and the write in the documentation that they have resolved the issues of the OpenBCI WIFI shield.

5. “The software ecosystem is rather spotty, there are multiple subprojects that are not functional and seem abandoned.“

comments of the MRIS:

  • There are a lot of software options for OpenBCI, OpenBCI GUI, LSL, OSC, Python, BrainFlow and we think there should be a solution if someone looking for a software which fit’s for his needs.

5. “This is not to say that I am complaining about the Cyton: it is not expensive, it is open hardware and source and it is possible with all open information to debug everything. However, I had expected or hoped that by now (after 9 years of its initial release) there would have been a version 2 of the Cyton board with improved usability. For me it felt that I was spending more time trying to debug than doing EEG, hence I moved on to other systems.”

comments of the MRIS:

We have discussed most of the issues mentioned by Robert Oostenveld in our journal and we think it is worth testing OpenBCI Cyton for ECG and EEG to see what we can do with it.