An official website of the United States government
Researchers can improve the ecological validity of brain research by studying humans moving in real-world settings. Recent work shows that dual-layer EEG can improve the fidelity of electrocortical recordings during gait, but it is unclear whether these positive results extrapolate to non-locomotor paradigms. For our study, we recorded brain activity with dual-layer EEG while participants played table tennis, a whole-body, responsive sport that could help investigate visuomotor feedback, object interception, and performance monitoring. We characterized artifacts with time-frequency analyses and correlated scalp and reference noise data to determine how well different sensors captured artifacts. As expected, individual scalp channels correlated more with noise-matched channel time series than with head and body acceleration. We then compared artifact removal methods with and without the use of the dual-layer noise electrodes. Independent Component Analysis separated channels into components, and we counted the number of high-quality brain components based on the fit of a dipole model and using an automated labeling algorithm. We found that using noise electrodes for data processing provided cleaner brain components. These results advance technological approaches for recording high fidelity brain dynamics in human behaviors requiring whole body movement, which will be useful for brain science research.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on December 1, 2025
Mobile brain–body imaging data set of indoor treadmill walking and outdoor walking with a visual search task
To fully understand brain processes in the real world, it is necessary to record and quantitatively analyse brain processes during real world human experiences. Mobile electroencephalography (EEG) and physiological data sensors provide new opportunities for studying humans outside of the laboratory. The purpose of this study was to document data from high-density EEG and mobile physiological sensors while humans performed a visual search task both on a treadmill in a laboratory setting and overground in a natural outdoor setting. The data set includes 49 young, healthy participants on an outdoor arboretum path and on a treadmill in a laboratory with a large virtual reality screen. The data provide a valuable research tool for scientists interested in signal processing, electrocortical brain processes, mobile brain imaging, and brain-computer interfaces based on mobile EEG. Given the comparison data between laboratory and real world conditions, researchers can test the viability of new processing algorithms across conditions or investigate changes in electrocortical activity related to behavioural dynamics coded into the data.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1835317
- PAR ID:
- 10552048
- Publisher / Repository:
- Elsevier
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Data in Brief
- Volume:
- 57
- Issue:
- C
- ISSN:
- 2352-3409
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 110968
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Assessing the stability of biological system models has aided in uncovering a plethora of new insights in genetics, neuroscience, and medicine. In this paper, we focus on analyzing the stability of neurological signals, including electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Interestingly, spatiotemporal discrete-time linear fractional-order systems (DTLFOS) have been shown to accurately and efficiently represent a variety of neurological and physiological signals. Here, we leverage the conditions for stability of DTLFOS to assess a real-world EEG data set. By analyzing the stability of EEG signals during movement and rest tasks, we provide evidence of the usefulness of the quantification of stability as a bio-marker for cognitive motor control.more » « less
-
Assessing the stability of biological system models has aided in uncovering a plethora of new insights in genetics, neuroscience, and medicine. In this paper, we focus on analyzing the stability of neurological signals, including electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Interestingly, spatiotemporal discrete-time linear fractional-order systems (DTLFOS) have been shown to accurately and efficiently represent a variety of neurological and physiological signals. Here, we leverage the conditions for stability of DTLFOS to assess a real-world EEG data set. By analyzing the stability of EEG signals during movement and rest tasks, we provide evidence of the usefulness of the quantification of stability as a bio-marker for cognitive motor control.more » « less
-
Objective: Accurate implementation of real-time non-invasive Brain-Machine / Computer Interfaces (BMI / BCI) requires handling physiological and non-physiological artifacts associated with the measurement modalities. For example, scalp electroencephalographic (EEG) measurements are often considered prone to excessive motion artifacts and other types of artifacts that contaminate the EEG recordings. Although the magnitude of such artifacts heavily depends on the task and the setup, complete minimization or isolation of such artifacts is generally not possible. Approach: We present an adaptive de-noising framework with robustness properties, using a Volterra based non-linear mapping to characterize and handle the motion artifact contamination in EEG measurements. We asked healthy able-bodied subjects to walk on a treadmill at gait speeds of 1-to-4 mph, while we tracked the motion of select EEG electrodes with an infrared video-based motion tracking system. We also placed Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors on the forehead and feet of the subjects for assessing the overall head movement and segmenting the gait. Main Results: We discuss in detail the characteristics of the motion artifacts and propose a real-time compatible solution to filter them. We report the effective handling of both the fundamental frequency of contamination (synchronized to the walking speed) and its harmonics. Event-Related Spectral Perturbation (ERSP) analysis for walking shows that the gait dependency of artifact contamination is also eliminated on all target frequencies. Significance: The real-time compatibility and generalizability of our adaptive filtering framework allows for the effective use of non-invasive BMI/BCI systems and greatly expands the implementation type and application domains to other types of problems where signal denoising is desirable. Combined with our previous efforts of filtering ocular artifacts, the presented technique allows for a comprehensive adaptive filtering framework to increase the EEG Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). We believe the implementation will benefit all non-invasive neural measurement modalities, including studies discussing neural correlates of movement and other internal states, not necessarily of BMI focus.more » « less
-
Abstract Objective. Understanding neural activity patterns in the developing brain remains one of the grand challenges in neuroscience. Developing neural networks are likely to be endowed with functionally important variability associated with the environmental context, age, gender, and other variables. Therefore, we conducted experiments with typically developing children in a stimulating museum setting and tested the feasibility of using deep learning techniques to help identify patterns of brain activity associated with different conditions.Approach. A four-channel dry EEG-based Mobile brain-body imaging data of children at rest and during videogame play (VGP) was acquired at the Children’s Museum of Houston. A data-driven approach based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) was used to describe underlying feature representations in the EEG and their ability to discern task and gender. The variability of the spectral features of EEG during the rest condition as a function of age was also analyzed.Main results. Alpha power (7–13 Hz) was higher during rest whereas theta power (4–7 Hz) was higher during VGP. Beta (13–18 Hz) power was the most significant feature, higher in females, when differentiating between males and females. Using data from both temporoparietal channels to classify between VGP and rest condition, leave-one-subject-out cross-validation accuracy of 67% was obtained. Age-related changes in EEG spectral content during rest were consistent with previous developmental studies conducted in laboratory settings showing an inverse relationship between age and EEG power.Significance. These findings are the first to acquire, quantify and explain brain patterns observed during VGP and rest in freely behaving children in a museum setting using a deep learning framework. The study shows how deep learning can be used as a data driven approach to identify patterns in the data and explores the issues and the potential of conducting experiments involving children in a natural and engaging environment.more » « less
