Soft electrode array for skin electro-physiology: New opportunities in sleep studies and rehabilitation

Electroencephalography (EEG) and surface electromyography (sEMG) are notoriously cumbersome technologies. A typical setup may involve bulky electrodes, dangling wires, and a large amplifier unit. Adapting these technologies to numerous applications has been accordingly fairly limited. Thanks to the availability of printed electronics, and low-power electronics it is now possible to effectively simplify these techniques to form skin electrophysiology with unprecedented performances, eliminating the need to handle multiple electrodes, wires and amplification units. Specifically, in this presentation, I will focus on the advantages of a newly developed soft printed electrodes which we developed in recent years. The system builds on soft electrodes with wireless signal transmission allowing electrode-skin stability, and user convenience during prolonged use (hours). Deep learning and blind source separation methods can also be used to enhance system performances, in particular reducing variability between individuals and sessions.

The presentation will outline several important applications and how each can benefit from the convergence of electrophysiology and novel skin electrophysiology. In the field of sleep, we validated the system against PSG, the gold standard in medical sleep staging and demonstrated its ability to perform sleep staging at home and detection of REM sleep without atonia (RSWA). The system was further used in other applications such as high-resolution facial EMG, finger gesture recognition and in rehabilitation, demonstrating the ability to obtain stable electrophysiological data under natural recording conditions.