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Have EEG devices improved much in recent years?

I read some books by Nicolelis' several years ago and it seemed back then that really useful BCI's still required invasive surgery because not only do you need to gather signals from a large number of neurons you also need to be able to distinguish them (and in EEG the signals are merged together and then further obscured by the effect of the skull etc.)

It will be interesting to see how much adoption Neuralink can get with the invasive approach.




That's my question as well - does EEG have any compelling everyday use-cases that aren't already covered by a heart rate monitor?


Apart from BCI (which after dropping out a PhD in this field, I am extremely skeptical of), EEG is used to measure things like sleep-wake cycles, as well as predicting seizures in epilepsy patients (which, to be fair, is also not a hugely proven technology). I believe there were also some tests using it to measure level of attention in fighter pilots.


Out of interest, why are you extremely sceptical? (I don't disagree, I'd simply be keen to hear more about your experience.)


Basically a whole lot of bullshit papers in the field, coupled with negligible improvement and a belief that AI will somehow magically solve the problem of garbage data.


I also left a PhD in the field (albeit right at the very start of the PhD) but this was also my impression.

I was shocked at how bad the state of the literature was with so many dubious papers, especially since the explosion of ML techniques.

I came from a Physics background and there you could generally trust the literature was legit and not just smoke and mirrors to get published.


Thanks, I appreciate your reply! I've worked in AI in past jobs - though I don't have an academic background in it - and I would definitely agree with the issue of garbage data, as I suspect would many real-world practitioners.


> I believe there were also some tests using it to measure level of attention in fighter pilots.

I would not put much (any) stock into this. The army has put out RFPs for using magnetic tourniquets to induce clotting without external pressure. With magic. Just because the military pays someone to try something does not mean that it is not entirely bullshit.


The ol' men staring at goats routine...


Surgery for brain scanning is disinformation




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