Cognitive load measurement - A methodology to compare low cost commercial EEG devices

Use of EEG signals in measuring cognitive load is a widely practiced area and falls under Brain-Computer-Interfacing (BCI) technology. However this technology uses medical grade EEG devices that are expensive as well as not user-friendly for regular use. Recent launch of low cost wireless EEG headsets from different companies opens up the possibility for commercialization of BCI and thus drew attention of the research community all over the world. While there are numerous studies on BCI with the use of medical grade devices there are limited numbers of papers reported on those using low cost devices. Moreover, reports on evaluating relative performance of these commercially available EEG devices based on a specific BCI experiment are minuscule. This paper attempts to fill this gap and presents a methodology to compare with various aspects between two widely used low cost wireless EEG devices namely Emotiv and Neurosky for application in cognitive load detection.