Worn EEG is powered by body heat and light
Belgian-Dutch company IMEC and the Holst Centre in Eindhoven have come up with a 2 channel wireless EEG system that can be worn on the head and is powered by a combination of body heat and ambient light
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The thermoelectric generator comprises six units made up from miniature commercial thermopiles. Each of the two radiators, on the left and right sides of the head, measure 40mm x 80mm and are made of silicon photovoltaic cells. In addition, thermally conductive comb type structures – thermal shunts – have been used to eliminate thermal barriers between skin and thermopiles caused by the user’s hair.
The EEG system uses IMEC’s proprietary low power biopotential readout ASIC to extract the EEG signals. A signal processing block encodes the data which is sent to a PC via a 2.4GHz wireless radio link. The whole system consumes only 0.8mW, well within the power available.
The current system is a smaller and lighter version of an earlier system that was powered solely by thermoelectric generators that had to be worn on the forehead.
For more information: http://www.imec.be/wwwinter/mediacenter/en/SSI_2008.shtml
