Robert Oostenveld is Associate Principal Investigator at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition.
Oostenveld leads the development of FieldTrip. FieldTrip is the MATLAB software toolbox for MEG, EEG and iEEG analysis, which is released free of charge as open source software under the GNU general public license. FieldTrip is developed by members and collaborators of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Robert Oostenveld has published many scientific papers:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=eEbaa0UAAAAJ&hl=de&oi=ao
And has been cited in 47 721 papers to this date. Oostenveld gave us very helpful information about the OpenBCI Cyton. And these where about issues he found or he has heard from other users of OpenBCI:
I have copied Robert Oostenveld’s answers from his blog:
to www.petergamma.org to be able to comment on this.
Robert Oostenveld:
- I have not used the OpenBCI Cyton for a while, but specific problems which I recall and saw others struggle with include the following:
- The connectivity with the dongle is not so stable, sometimes requiring multiple attempts to connect, resetting the board, replugging the dongle, etc.
Peter Gamma:
Which means this is a solution which is not reliable for medical and research applications, or to analyse or quantifiy physiological data during practicing meditation.
Robert Oostenveld:
- 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.
- 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.
Peter Gamma:
- Which means this is a solution which is not reliable for medical and research applications, or to analyse physiological data during practicing meditation.
Robert Oostenveld:
- The wifi shield only works sporadically and hence cannot be relied on.
Peter Gamma:
- These issues are known.
- The WIFI shield is not available anymore from www.OpenBCI.com. It has pulled from the www.OpenBCI.com shop since it had issues.
-It is available from Chinese sellers on Aliexpress or eBay. - Some eventually have issues, some have not.
- The WIFI shield can be repaired as shown here:
- alwayswearshats invested a lot of time in finding it out how to do this:
- But I do not know of users who confirm to have repaired it
- Users who seem to have done it are the developers who developed their own device based upon OpenBCI, and these are Conor Russomanno with the Galea, and AJ Keller with Neurosity.
- Recently a paper was published which used an OpenBCI setup which uses a WIFI shield:
- The paper:
The paper:
«A Novel OpenBCI Framework for EEG-Based Neurophysiological Experiments»
- shows us experiments which no one has ever done before with OpenBCI:
https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/23/7/3763
- It shows furthermore that also in the year 2023 scientist can use a 16 channel OpenBCI setup with a WFI shield which works and can write a paper with it.
A second paper:
The validity and reliability of an open source biosensing board to quantify heart rate variability
https://www.cell.com/heliyon/pdf/S2405-8440(21)01251-2.pdf
- Shows us how to use OpenBCI to quantivy heart rate variablity.
Robert Oostenveld:
- The software ecosystem is rather spotty, there are multiple subprojects that are not functional and seem abandoned.
Peter Gamma:
- This eventually can solved by adding a 3th. party software, but the question if open if it is worth it.
Robert Oostenveld:
- 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.
Peter Gamma:
- I also found evidence that OpenBCI has issues:
- Although I did not test OpenBCI Cyton myself, I studied OpenBCI on 344 posts on www.petergamma.org:
https://petergamma.org/tag/openbci/
- OpenBCI stand for Open Brain-Computer Interface (OpenBCI). And I am a physiologist and my goal is not to build a brain computer interface, but to do physiology.
- Krisztián Hofstädter showed us a demonstration of the an OpenBCI setup with Greentek Geelfree S3 EEG cap, when he was listening to music.
- His demonstration shows us only EEG data on 2 channels in OpenBCI:
- Krisztián was able to demonstrate, that alpha waves increase during listening to music.
- This is not a brain computer interface, this is a physiological signal.
- But we can have this as well with the Muse and the Mind Monitor which shows 4 channels of EEG and an increase in alpha waves during practicing meditation.
- Users have shown this in the Mind Monitor forum.
- To see alpha brain waves does not require Krisztián Hofstädter’s setup, the Muse headband with a Mind monitor is sufficient.
- But I suppose the Muse headband with the Mind Monitor is not suitable for scientific studies. Arnaud Delorme tested this with the Mind Monitor. But he did not write a paper about it, he only published his results on YouTube. And I suppose the same is true to use OpenBCI for phyisiological reserach. Or if it is possible, the effort to get this device there is too big.
- So is OpenBCI a device to do physiological reserach with it?
- According to my own little experience from a person who did not use this device to this date, but studied a lot of data which are available about this device, it is suitable to do some experiments.
- It can for instance be suitable to do some experiments to see if a 16 channel OpenBCI setup is suitable and helpful to study physiological parameters during mediation.
- Is it for instance worth it to use an OpenBCI setup instead of the Muse headband for meditators?
- I think to do some experiments it eventually could be helpful. For instance to see if it is worth it to buy or to build an expensive EEG heatset with for instance 16 channels.
- This expecially concerns localized gamma wave activity in the left prefrontal cortex of the brain. This activity should be highly increased in high-level meditators. Can we see this with an OpenBCI setup with 16 channels, or can we quantify it?
- If we can, then the OpenBCI setup is worth to do some experiments, but because of the many issues which are mentioned here, I suppose this device is not suitable to quantify physiological parameters during practicing meditation and do scientific studies with it.