PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Etienne, Arnelle
AU  - Laroia, Tarana
AU  - Weigle, Harper
AU  - Afelin, Amber
AU  - Kelly, Shawn K
AU  - Krishnan, Ashwati
AU  - Grover, Pulkit
TI  - Novel Electrodes for Reliable EEG Recordings on Coarse and Curly Hair
AID  - 10.1101/2020.02.26.965202
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.02.26.965202
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/02/27/2020.02.26.965202.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/02/27/2020.02.26.965202.full
AB  - EEG is a powerful and affordable brain sensing and imaging tool used extensively for the diagnosis of neurological disorders (e.g. epilepsy), brain computer interfacing, and basic neuroscience. Unfortunately, most EEG electrodes and systems are not designed to accommodate coarse and curly hair common in individuals of African descent. This can lead to poor quality data that might be discarded in scientific studies after recording from a broader population set, and for clinical diagnoses, lead to an uncomfortable and/or emotionally taxing experience, and, in the worst cases, misdiagnosis. In this work, we design a system to explicitly accommodate coarse and curly hair, and demonstrate that, across time, our electrodes, in conjunction with appropriate braiding, attain substantially (~10x) lower impedance than state-of-the-art systems. This builds on our prior work that demonstrated that braiding hair in patterns consistent with the clinical standard 10-20 arrangement leads to improved impedance with existing systems.