EEG-based Personal Identification: from Proof-of-Concept to A Practical System

Although the concept of using brain waves, e.g. Electroencephalogram (EEG), for personal identification has been validated in several studies, some unanswered practical and theoretical questions prevent this technology from further development for commercialization. Based on a well-designed personal identification experiment using EEG recordings, this study addressed three of these questions, which are (1) feasibility of using portable EEG equipment, (2) necessity for controlling factors influencing EEG, (3) the optimal set of features. With our understanding of the answers to these questions, the EEG-based personal identification system we built achieved an average accuracy of 97.5% on a dataset with 40 subjects. Results of this study provided supporting evidence that EEG-based personal identification from proof-of-concept to system implementation is promising.