Stimulation/Presentation package for running EEG experiments

[hemang]

Hi Guys,
I am trying to run a few experiments in which I would like to show different pictures and videos to few subjects and to record their brain activity to observe if it can be used for biometric authentication.
Can anyone suggest any stimulation package to present the stimuli to the subject to achieve timing accuracy during signal acquisition.
I found EEVOKE provided by ANT can be used for this purpose but it can be used only on windows XP but I need something that can be used on Windows 7.
Please help guys. Thanks in advance.

[fabien.lotte]

Dear Hemang,

To achieve precise stimulation acquisition during such experiment you can basically used any presentation software (e.g., presentation or E-prime), and mark the EEG data with the events/stimulations directly at the hardware level (with a dedicated cable for you EEG acquisition device). In this way the stimulations and EEG signals will be tightly synchronised within openvibe and you can process them efficiently. We did that with the Presentation software for a stress/workload experiment with OpenViBE and it worked perfectly fine.

I hope this helps,

Best,
Fabien

[hemang]

Hi Fabien,

Thanks for the reply. Can you please explain a little bit more about this "mark the EEG data with the events/stimulations directly at the hardware level (with a dedicated cable for you EEG acquisition device)".
I am using a Emotiv Epoch headset for the experiments.
I am a newbie and I really appreciate your help.

Hemang

[fabien.lotte]

Thank you for the precision. Actually with most medical grade EEG device you can have an hardware cable that is connected to the EEG amplifier, through which the event/stimulation generated by the application are sent, so that the EEG signals and events are synchronized at the hardware level. That's the best synchronisation you can have. Unfortunately you cannot do that with the Emotiv EPOC. So you will have to use software tagging, on which you can find information there: http://openvibe.inria.fr/send-stimulati ... on-server/

Best,
Fabien

[hemang]

Thanks for the reply Fabien. The information you provided was very helpful.
Can you please tell me which is the cheapest EEG device which have the hardware cable that is connected to the EEG amplifier through which stimulation are sent? I will try to get one if approved.

[fabien.lotte]

Sorry, I don't really know which is the cheapest system which has a trigger input (hardware input for events). I am using g.tec but it is not particularly cheap. I guess biosemi is probably a relatively cheap medical grade EEG system with a trigger input, but it is still way more expensive than an Emotiv Epoc...

[hemang]

Thanks for the information Fabien. In the link you provided for software tagging, can you please tell me what is the 'external application' here? Is it the presentation software used for presenting stimuli and if it is so how is it going to send triggers to the acquisition server?

Its not clear in the document that where I need to put the code after making any changes in the downloaded code, like calling the sendStimulation(uint64 stimulationCode) function as mentioned in the example to send the stimulation trigger to the acquisition server?

Thanks a lot for your help.

[fabien.lotte]

Hi, I am sorry, I never programmed an application with software tagging for OpenViBE myself, so I don't really know the answer to your question. Maybe some other people on this forum are more experienced with that?
Regarding the external application, it can be a standard presentation application (presentation/e-prime/whatever) or any application that you may have coded yourself. If I am not wrong, the new P300-speller (co-adapt P300-speller: http://openvibe.inria.fr/coadapt-p300-s ... -tutorial/) in OpenViBE has been coded based on this principle, so you can probably have a look at the code of this application to know more about how to implement software tagging within OpenViBE. Sorry that I cannot help you more!

Best,
Fabien

[corvexx]

Hi guys,

For this task I would suggest to try our stimulus presentation package, EventIDE (http://www.okazolab.com/feature-list), which is compatible with OpenViBE. EventIDE allows present videos, pictures and sending sync markers but there is something more. You can also monitor and analyze EEG signals in real-time, at the background of your task This also implies a neurofeedback control- the stimulus presentation can be easily adjusted based on characteristics of the EEG signal with millisecond accuracy.

Disclosure: I am a developer in the EventIDE project

Cheers,
Ilia

[AdamM]

@hemang: I don't know if you are still working on this, but one possible solution to presentation and recording synchronization is to control both from within OpenViBE. For a recent binaural beats experiment, I used a python script box to generate stimulations that both controlled the binaural beats audio (via a command line box), and were recorded along with the data stream. If you can control your presentation of images either through a terminal command or via a python or lua script, then this solution might work for you as well.

Cheers,
Adam

[arshin]

Dear Hemang,

To achieve precise stimulation acquisition during such experiment you can basically used any presentation software (e.g., presentation or E-prime), and mark the EEG data with the events/stimulations directly at the hardware level (with a dedicated cable for you EEG acquisition device). In this way the stimulations and EEG signals will be tightly synchronised within openvibe and you can process them efficiently. We did that with the Presentation software for a stress/workload experiment with OpenViBE and it worked perfectly fine.

I hope this helps,

Best,
Fabien

Hi fabien,

Please bro help me out on how to mark EEG data with the events directly at hardware level using e-prime and openvibe? I am getting confused with the hardware and software part. In E-prime one can add a device as parallel port and then in openvibe there is TCP\IP tagging so how to use them. I have read "http://openvibe.inria.fr/send-stimulati ... on-server/" and some what understood but cannot meet the dots.


Thanks in anticipation

Arshin