Wearable EEG headband using printed electrodes and powered by energy harvesting for emotion monitoring in ambient assisted living

Abstract

Globally, human life expectancy is steadily increasing causing an increase in the elderly population and consequently increased costs of supporting them. Ambient assisted living is an active research area aimed at supporting elderly people to live independently in their preferred living environment. This paper presents the design and testing of a self-powered wearable headband for electroencephalogram (EEG) based detection of emotions allowing the evaluation of the quality of life of assisted people. Printed active electrode fabrication and testing is discussed followed by the design of an energy harvester for powering the headband. The results show that the fabricated electrodes have similar performance to commercial electrodes and that the electronics embedded into the headband, as well as the wireless sensor node used for processing the EEG, can be powered by energy harvested from solar panels integrated on the headband. An average real time emotion classification accuracy of 90 (±9) % was obtained from 12 subjects. The results show that the self-powered wearable headband presented in this paper can be used to measure the wellbeing of assisted people with good accuracy.