A Long-Lasting Textile-Based Anatomically Realistic Head Phantom for Validation of EEG Electrodes

Abstract

During the development of new electroencephalography electrodes, it is important to surpass the validation process. However, maintaining the human mind in a constant state is impossible which in turn makes the validation process very difficult. Besides, it is also extremely difficult to identify noise and signals as the input signals are not known. For that reason, many researchers have developed head phantoms predominantly from ballistic gelatin. Gelatin-based material can be used in phantom applications, but unfortunately, this type of phantom has a short lifespan and is relatively heavyweight. Therefore, this article explores a long-lasting and lightweight (−91.17%) textile-based anatomically realistic head phantom that provides comparable functional performance to a gelatin-based head phantom. The result proved that the textile-based head phantom can accurately mimic body-electrode frequency responses which make it suitable for the controlled validation of new electrodes. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the textile-based head phantom was found to be significantly better than the ballistic gelatin-based head providing a 15.95 dB ± 1.666 (±10.45%) SNR at a 95% confidence interval.