Last Updated on January 7, 2024 by pg@petergamma.org
We removed three pictures from our frontpage and these where pictures for the Polar OH1, the Garmin Fenix 6 and the Emotiv Epoc Flex 32. We replaced those by other pictures which show a Raspberry Pi, ECG and EEG brainwaves.
We have still a picture of Mingyur Rinpoche with 256 EEG electrodes placed on his head, and a colorful time-frequency plot with 256 EEG channels. We do not use these kind of equipment in the MRIS. But the MRIS was triggered by a PNAS paper by the group of Richard Davidson which used such equipement:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0407401101
The projects of the MRIS can be described as a project which is similar to Richard Davidsons “Altered Traits” project:
but it goes from the bottom to the top and is optimized for low-cost high-quality physiological sensors which are suitable to study the long-term effect of practicing meditation. But there is currently only one subject under investigation, and we have no physiological data from this subject yet. This is a situation from which we suffer.
The Polar OH1 and the Garmin Fenix 6 are little suitable for our application. The reason is that we did not find a sustainable community who wrote accuracy validation papers for optical heart rate monitors from Polar, Garmin, etc. smartwatches.
We have currently no plans to use the Emotiv Epoc Flex 32 for our application as well, since we prefer a device with a higher sampling rate.
We became interested in these or similar devices through DC Rainmaker, Rob ter Horst and Cody Rall on YouTube. We found only view devices reviewed by those which fitted our needs. It is difficult trust reviews on YouTube and how objective they are, since we do not know how many of these videos are paid promotional reviews which are not declaired as this.
Our preferred device is currently OpenBCI Cyton with 16 channel and WIFI shield for ECG and EEG, altough we did not test this device yet, but we did only review it. OpenBCI has become more affordable since it can be directly imported from China, and the high rate of 24 bit analog to digital conversion is superior to the rate of the Emotiv Epoc Flex 32.
16 channels are view channels for our application, and we miss a device with more channels. But we haven’t found a device with more channels which fits our needs to this date.
We have picked up the Raspberry Pi for our project since we think a single board computer combined with for instance EEG devices has many advantages, as for instance:
- It is suitable for for mobile applications.
- A SBC computer combined with EEG makes WIFI transmission unnecessary if the EEG device is connected directly to a Pi.
The Raspberry Pi is still our preferred single board computer altough Pi had problems with chip shortage. We decided for that reason just not to choose the latest Pi model, but only the second latest, or a model which can be bought used and can be refurbised.
According to our own little experience there are too much devices on the market which are too little optimized for low-cost high-quality. And the question arrises if viewer devices based on the same architecture used by different manufacturers would not be better, for the manufactureres as well as for the users.
Physiologists like us suffer since we did not find better devices which we could introduce and suggest to others to use them, for instance a device with more channels which is optimized for low-cost high-quality. But still we are asking the question: is OpenBCI with 16 channels and WIFI shield not a better device for meditators than a Muse headband?
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