Development of an experimental portable electroencephalograph (case study: Alpha wave detector)

This paper describes the development of an electroencephalograph (EEG device) with portable application possibilities. The hardware design is based on the ModularEEG. It is redeveloped mainly to run from 3 V batteries and consume less power. The developed firmware detects the alpha brainwave without using any computer (PC). It uses signal correlation and windowing technique to detect the alpha frequency band. The same technique is used to detect the 50 Hz artifact concurrently. This artifact together with the average of the signal is used to disable the alpha detection output to reduce false-positive results. The device can also deliver the plain digitized EEG signal to a PC using the Modular EEG packet format version 3.