Smarter Life Challenge - Brainwaves based appliance controller - Update 3

Here I am with my third update on my brainwaves based appliance controller project.  Things started to be harder and harder: after getting enough familiar with PSoC Creator and building a few small applications (that was fun!) I felt that I need to start looking into how I will measure brain waves. This is probably the most difficult part of my project, so I spent a lot of time reading and then I built my first set of sensors as shown in the figure below.

These are called passive sensors and are applied directly to the skin (usually using a conductive gel in between, but I try to avoid this if I can make them work without gel).

Next step I can describe as a tedious work of wearing the sensors and measuring brain wave signals in various parts of the head and process the data using various settings for signal filters trying to remove measurement artifacts especially the 60Hz component.  You can see me below in the middle of these experiments (and you can imagine me later when I got even more tired – not to mention how many times I asked my self the question why I did not pick something simpler for this project so I could be almost done by now…)

Measurements showed a lot of noise but I was able to sense when I closed and opened my eyes, as I show in the screenshot below.

Further analysis of brain waves did not distinguish any other type of brain waves, so I decided to improve my sensors by adding an amplifier.  The second set of sensors that are now called active sensors are shown in the picture below:

With these sensors I was able to measure a combination of alpha (~8-12Hz) signals on the occipital part of the head, as you can see in the FFT screenshot below.

The signals are still hard to extract out of noise so I don’t know how I will be able to distinguish among various types of brainwaves and then to use them to control appliances.  This is a hard challenge for which I do not have a solution yet.   So this is where I am now; basically the measurement of brain waves remains still a challenge and this is what I will be focussing on next.

All my best wishes until my next update, and good luck to all smart challenge contestants in your project work.

Cosmin