An experimental study on semi-invasive acupuncture-based EEG signal acquisition

EEG is the most frequently applied method for capturing the brain activity due to its high temporal resolution and portability, and its low cost and health risks. However, EEG signals have very low signal to noise ratio due to the effects of scalp, skull, and many other layers as well as noise generated by physiological and non-physiological artifacts. Furthermore, preparation of EEG monitoring equipment and making proper contact between skin and electrodes is a tedious and time-consuming task due to presence of hair and different skull shapes. In this paper, we report the experimental attempts on improving the accuracy of EEG acquisition using a semi-invasive approach which utilizes acupuncture-based needle penetration to alleviate the effect of sculpt on the EEG signals and enhance the preparation efficiency. High level cluster analysis and low level signal analysis on real-life data recorded for nine physical, lingual, and motor imagery tasks suggest that contrary to our expectations, the proposed method is not effective.