Using conductive fabric for capacitive EEG measurements

Abstract

Traditional electroencephalogram (EEG) measurements require conductive gel to ensure good conduction between the electrodes and skin (or scalp). But this gel may make patients uncomfortable because of possible skin allergies during long-term measurement. The measurement procedure is also tedious because pasting the electrodes to the patients scalp is time consuming. The required lead wires also constrain patient movements. This study uses conductive fabric as the capacitive electrode for EEG measurements. This paper provides the design considerations and the related theoretical analysis for this method. A long-term, null-input experiment was conducted to verify the stability of the proposed system. Experiments were conducted over the hair of patients to verify the feasibility of using the method during EEG monitoring. Various mental task experiments were also conducted. The changes in frequency domain analysis show that the proposed strategy discriminates between different mental tasks.