Computer-controlled electrical stimulation of facial muscles by facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (fNMES): Hardware and software solutions

Background: Computer controlled electrical stimulation of facial muscles is a promising method to study facial feedback effects, though little guidance is available for new adopters. New Method: Facial Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation (fNMES) offers a spatially and temporally precise means of manipulating facial muscles during experiments, and can be combined with EEG to study the neurological basis of facial feedback effects. Precise delivery of stimulation requires hardware and software solutions to integrate stimulators and a stimulus-presenting computer. We provide open-source hardware schematics and relevant computer code in order to achieve this integration, so as to facilitate the use of fNMES in the laboratory. Results: Hardware schematics are provided for the building of a bespoke control module, which allows researchers to finely control stimulator output whilst participants complete computer tasks. In addition, we published code that new adopters of NMES can use within their experiments to control the module and send event triggers to another computer. These hard- and software solutions were successfully used to investigate the effects of facial muscle activation on felt and perceived emotion. We summarise these findings and discuss the integration of fNMES with EEG and peripheral physiological measures. Comparison with existing methods: Our inexpensive hardware solution allows fNMES parameters to be computer controlled, and thus allows to stimulate facial muscles with high precision. This opens up new possibilities to investigate, for example, facial feedback effects. Conclusions: We provide tools and guidance to build a control module in order to precisely deliver electrical stimulation to facial muscles using a stimulus computer (while recording EEG or other peripheral physiology).