Democratizing EEG: Embedding Electroencephalography in a Head-Mounted Display for Ubiquitous Brain-Computer Interfacing

Open hardware and the need for ecologically valid measurements drive the Electroencephalography (EEG) democratization movement-EEG has been steadily transcending the boundaries of clinical research, making its way into interdisciplinary fields. In Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), EEG is used to measure cognitive workload and infer cognitive processes for building cognition-aware systems. We describe and evaluate our BCIglass prototype where EEG electrodes are embedded in the frame of a mainstream Head-Mounted Display (HMD) to create a skull-peripheral topology. We devised a lab study with 34 participants who completed seven established cognitive tasks. Then, we conducted a pilot field study with one participant to test BCIglass in everyday-life settings. Our findings demonstrate that BCIglass captures EEG activity in a manner comparable to a research-grade EEG-cap system. Our topology infers the cognitive task at hand, and the underlying cognitive process(es) by proxy, with an accuracy of similar to 80% and only three electrodes at the skull periphery. Embedding EEG electrodes in lightweight HMDs represents a promising approach in the quest to achieve ubiquitous brain-computer interfacing in real-world settings.