Low-cost circuit design of EEG signal acquisition for the brain-computer interface system

Increasing number of research activities and different types of studies in brain-computer interface systems (BCIs) show potential in this young research area. However, BCIs have not become widely applied, most of them are still limited in the laboratory and off-line. One of the important reasons is that: EEG signal acquisition is completed by the professional medical equipments. They are expensive and the parameters of them cannot be flexiblely changed with the specific BCI experiment paradigm. In the paper, a single-channel low-cost circuit of EEG signal acquisition for the BCI system is designed. The circuit is composed of protection circuit, instrumentation amplifier, common mode rejection (CMR) circuit, gain adjustable amplifiers and filters. In order to test this circuit, the circuit simulation and the real-time EEG measurements are implemented. The experimental results show that the circuit is effective with good performance, it is very suitable for the online BCI system.