Proposing a Standardized Protocol for Raw Biosignal Transmission

In this paper, we propose a standardized interface called TiA (TOBI interface A) to transmit raw biosignals, supporting multirate and block-oriented transmission of different kinds of signals from various acquisition devices (e.g., EEG, electrooculogram, near-infrared spectroscopy signals, etc.) at the same time. To facilitate a distinction between those kinds of signals, so-called signal types are introduced. TiA is a single-server, multiple-client system, whereby clients can connect to the server at runtime. Information transfer between client and server is divided into control and data connections. The control connections use transmission control protocol (TCP) and transmit extensible-markup-language (XML)-encoded meta information. The data transmission utilizes a user datagram protocol (UDP) or TCP with a binary data stream. A standardized handshaking procedure for the connection setup and a standardized binary data packet has been defined. Thus, a standardized layer, abstracting used hardware devices and facilitating distributed raw data transmission in a standardized way, has been evolved. A cross-platform library, implemented in C++, is available for download.