Strange things happened with Lab Streaming Layer for Muse headband and OpenBCI

Last Updated on January 27, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

Several years ago, we where really happy to find and an example from Arnaud Delorme where he showed an example with Muse, where he connected the Muse 1 over the Muse SDK to Lab Streaming Layer.

Lab Streaming Layer for Muse 1

Finally, a really professional software interface from EEGLAB developer Arnaud Delorme, which makes out of the Muse headband a device which can be used for scientific studies. But shortly after that, we found out, that Interaxon does not offer the Muse SDK anymore, which made the example of Arnaud Delorme useless.

Lab Streaming Layer for Muse 2

Another strange story is the Muse LSL of Alexandre Barachant. He coded a Muse LSL for fun and in it s spare time over the weekend together with a friend, and published it on his personal web-site, and never used it for scientific studies.

LSL for OpenBCI

  • Irene Vigué-Guix,BS in BioEngineering & MS in Brain and Cognition & PhD in TIC:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Irene-Vigue-Guix

  • coded for fun and in her spare time over the week-and and over the OpenBCI Bluetooth dongle a Lab Streaming Layer interface for OpenBCI, and published it on her WordPress site:
  • Robert Oostenveld wrote for fun and in his spare time over the week-end a review about the Unicorn Black and published it on his WordPress site.
  • Alexandre Barachant wrote for fun and in his spare time over the week-end a review about the OpenBCI Cyton, published it on his personal web-site and never used it for his scientific work.

All these things seem very strange to us. Doing all this was a lot of hard work for these scientist. It is not comprehensible for us personally, why these highly qualified great scientists did not publish their great work in a high quality scientific journal. All of those are qualified for this. If they would have done this, this would make these devices much more interesting for scientific studies.

We wonder why this did not happen and who profits from this. The profit goes to the manufacturers of expensive EEG devices. Without high-quality interfaces published in a high quality journals, the use of low-cost high-quality devices for scientific purposes is limited. We have to buy the expensive equipment from EEG device manufacturers. That’s really too bad, and something needs to change. EEG devices are really non-sellers and what happened here makes the situation even worse.