Wearable BCI
A direction I want to work in — non-invasive ear-EEG with soft, liquid-metal contacts
This is a research interest, not work I have carried out. Nothing on this page has been built or measured — it is the direction I would like to take the liquid-metal contact work next.
Why this interests me
Ear-EEG is attractive because the ear is one of the few places a person will tolerate wearing an electrode all day. The cEEGrid form factor already showed that useful signals can be recorded from around the ear rather than across the scalp.
The hard part is the contact. Wet Ag/AgCl electrodes give a good interface and then dry out within hours. Dry electrodes last indefinitely and start with an impedance an order of magnitude higher, plus motion artefacts that get worse as the person moves.
Where my own work might connect
The liquid-metal work I do now is about getting a soft conductor to stay in intimate contact with skin without adhesive primers or post-processing. That is the same problem an all-day EEG contact has, stated in different words. Whether catechol-anchored liquid metal actually helps at the ear is an open question — the impedance benefit would have to be demonstrated against both a wet and a dry baseline before the idea is worth anything.
What I would need to find out first
- Does a soft liquid-metal contact hold its impedance over a full day of wear, or does it drift like a dry electrode?
- Does it survive the mechanical reality of an ear — insertion, jaw movement, sweat?
- Is the improvement large enough to matter for the paradigms people actually use (auditory attention, sleep staging), or only in a bench measurement?
If I end up in a group working on non-invasive neural interfaces, these are the questions I would want to start on.