Wearable wireless pediatric EEG

Design of a portable, wireless EEG system for easy, fast and automatic testing of newborns via an ultra-low-power programmable digital platform and a wearable device adapted to newborns. This project has been financed by an ERC Proof of Concepts grant to Giorgio Vallortigara (NeuroSoNew) and entails a multi-center collaboration with Velu Kumaravel (PhD student at CIMeC and FBK), Elisabetta Farella (FBK, Trento), Simone Benatti (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia), Victor Kartsch and Luca Benini (University of Bologna). I coordinated all the development of the project. We successfully tested a prototype of the portable EEG system on adults with flickering checkerboards at both low and high stimulation frequencies (Kartsch et al., 2022). We also developed a version of the software NEAR (Kumaravel et al., 2022) for artifact correction in low-density EEG systems that we successfully tested on the prototype (Kumaravel et al., 2021).

More recently, we tested an alternative wireless EEG system based on embroidered electrodes embedded in a comfortable, textile headband (collaboration with Komal Komal, Southeast Technological University, Ireland). Validation demonstrated detectability of spectral/ERP functional responses comparable to a commercial sponge-based EEG cap, while substantially improving user comfort (Komal et al., 2026).

References:

Kumaravel VP, Kartsch V, Benatti S, Vallortigara G, Farella E, Buiatti M,

Efficient Artifact Removal from Low-Density Wearable EEG using Artifacts Subspace Reconstruction,

43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC), 333-336 (2021).

Kumaravel VP, Farella E, Parise E, Buiatti M,

NEAR: An artifact removal pipeline for human newborn EEG data.

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 101068 (2022)

Kartsch V, Kumaravel VP, Benatti S, Vallortigara G, Benini L, Farella E, Buiatti M,

Efficient Low-Frequency SSVEP detection with wearable EEG using Normalized Canonical Correlation Analysis.

Sensors 22(24), 9803 (2022)

Komal K, Cleary F, Narayanan RP,  Wells JSG, Buiatti M*, Bennett L*

Design and validation of a modular smart headband with embroidered electrodes for comfortable EEG monitoring.

Plos One 21(9): e0347189 (2026)

*shared senior authorship