In January 2014 Joel Murphy and Conor Russomanno crowdfunded OpenBCI as a low cost, programmable, and open source EEG platform to allow users to access their brainwaves. Their open source community had scientists, engineers, educators and makers all working together to give the world a better understanding of the brain. They broke down EEG into three basic components – electrodes placed on the scalp to take data, an amplifier to sense and transmit the electrical charges, and a signal processing computer to convert the data to an output.
The team is back with a $99 entry point device called the Ganglion board. Ganglion is open source, compatible with Arduino and has four diodata input channels. It is intended to bring more biohackers, students, makers and researchers into the biosensing field. A new headset, the Ultracortex Mark IV, is also available as a 3D printed helmet with space for 61 different sampling locations and three size options.
Brain data (EEG), muscle data (EMG), and heart activity (ECG) are the main data streams that OpenBCI will measure but the community is finding and developing more applications in the more than twenty countries where the OpenBCI platform is used.
The goals of OpenBCI as a company are reflected in this campaign. They want to keep making biosensing more accessible to everyone. The design goals for the new headset were to build more nodes for sampling, provide more comfort for the patient through adjustability, and more easily secure the electrodes and cabling. They have built an extensive learning page that gives new users tools to start using the platform right away. A Simblee microcontroller provides the connection and programming power to the Mark IV, and also allows for over-the-air software updates. Samples can be taken at 128, 256, 512 or 1024 frequencies, and the Ganglion is compatible with standard SD cards for local data storage.
This is an awesome project to democratize biodata. One of the perennial items on the National Academy of Engineering’s list of Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century is to Reverse Engineer the Brain, and it’s great to see companies working to further that goal.