A feasibility study of Peter Gamma from www.petergamma.org about using OpenBCI for research applications

Last Updated on September 4, 2024 by pg@petergamma.org

Peter made a short literature search to find out if there is someone who uses OpenBCI for research applications. He found this paper:

It was published in Heliyon on Mar 2020:

A feasibility study of a complete low-cost consumer-grade brain-computer interface system:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32154404

There it says:

„Despite of the communication problems perceived by the practitioners during acquisition, the OpenBCI boards offer user-friendly interfaces, allowing to non-EEG experimented researchers to acquire their own biosignals in non-controlled environments.“

According to the view of Peter Gamma from www.petergamma.org, OpenBCI products are interesting for research. But products from www.openbci.com are expensive. You can find more affordable products on Aliexpress and eBay. They have issues which can be resolved, but you have to do it yourself. So we have in principle an affordable solution up to 16 channels, if you are ready to repair those modules by yourself.

Then we have PiEEG. An interesting solution, in principle. A combination of a 8 channel EEG chip with a Raspberry Pi. But we suppose PiEEG has issues with noise. And William Croft says PiEEG is a prototype Neurosity Crown CEO A.J. Keller has given up. If PiEEG would be interesting, would it not be on the market since a long time and often used? Bit it is not. And if all the same someone fixes PiEEG, and someone is able to build a 32 channel EEG device from 4 PiEEGs as described here:

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2207974#p2207974

And if it comes onto the market, who knows that the costs of PiEEG do not increase dramatically? As of instance the price of 32 channel EEG boards which started from around 700 $ and went up to $ 5,252.64 now on Aliexpress:

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/1005002553363982.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.main.29.2f92XQwYXQwYjr&algo_pvid=ffc8ce7f-c128-4055-a857-83d81830ff96&algo_exp_id=ffc8ce7f-c128-4055-a857-83d81830ff96-14&pdp_npi=4%40dis%21CHF%214884.08%214542.19%21%21%2140000.66%2137200.58%21%40211b815c17253755667742981eb359%2112000021112695409%21sea%21CH%21777421489%21X&curPageLogUid=FUNbDfI6K9rV&utparam-url=scene%3Asearch%7Cquery_from%3A&gatewayAdapt=4itemAdapt

Without any further contribution by the developer of this board which would have made the board more valuable. It seems that for instance that the sellers who sell EEG products in the Aliexpress Helios store, a store which also sell OpenBCI modules, seem not really be interested in selling products, but rather in increasing prices.

So if you start building a device for research based on the above products, you have the risk that sellers keep watching you and want to make money out of you and increase prices.

The OpenBCI WIFI shield was not repaired by www.openbci.com. Why then to hope that someone brings a PiEEG onto the market in a form with is also interesting for costumers? Currently, it is not, since hardly anyone seems to buy it.

OpenBCI products based on the ADS1299 can be used also by non-EEG experimented researchers to acquire their own biosignals in non-controlled environments.“

As a paper in the journal Heliyon wrote four years ago. But Peter Gamma from www.petergamma.org invites EEG experimented researchers, or the researchers who study products based on the e ADS1299 chip from TI since several years, as we do, to start building EEG devices based on InfluxDB, which do not have the issues mentioned above. You can find the information we gathered in recent years under the tag “influxDB”:

https://petergamma.org/category/influxdb