Validating a LEGO-Like EEG Headset for a Simultaneous Recording of Wet- and Dry-Electrode Systems During Treadmill Walking

Recent mobile and wearable electroencephalogram (EEG)-sensing technologies have been demonstrated to be effective for measuring rapid changes of spatio-spectral EEG correlates of brain and cognitive functions of interest with more ecologically natural settings. However, commercial EEG products are available commonly with a fixed headset in terms of the number of electrodes and their locations to the scalp practically constrains their generalizability for different demands of EEG and brain-computer interface (BCI) study. While most progress focused on innovation of sensing hardware and conductive electrodes, less effort has been done to renovate mechanical structures of an EEG headset. Recently, an electrode-holder assembly infrastructure was designed to be capable of unlimitedly (re)assembling a desired n-channel electrode headset through a set of primary elements (i.e., LEGO-like headset). The present work empirically demonstrated one of its advantage regarding coordinating the homogeneous or heterogeneous sensors covering the target regions of the brain. Towards this objective, an 8-channel LEGO headset was assembled to conduct a simultaneous event-related potential (ERP) recording of the wet- and dry-electrode EEG systems and testify their signal quality during standing still versus treadmill walking. The results showed that both systems returned a comparable P300 signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for standing, yet the dry system was more susceptible to the movement artifacts during slow walking. The LEGO headset infrastructure facilitates a desired benchmark study, e.g., comparing the signal quality of different electrodes on non-stationary subjects conducted in this work, or a specific EEG and BCI application.