Message from the Editor

OPINION

September 2020

Ricardo Chavarriaga

The COVID19 pandemic has brought upon us an unprecedented situation. The current events have had a profound impact at a global scale and have once more shown the important role that science and technology play in providing solutions to societal challenges.

Temporary Tattoo Electrodes for brain recordings in clinical settings

RESEARCH

September 2020

Laura M. Ferrari1*, E. Ismailova3*, F.Greco2*

Temporary Tattoo Electrodes (TTEs) are dry and conformable electrodes that are able to capture weak surface electrophysiological signals while being imperceptible for the user. We demonstrated the use and characterised TTEs in a clinical electroencephalography (EEG) monitoring set-up, proving for the first time the compatibility of a dry electrode with magnetoencephalography (MEG) sensors (Figure 1) (1).

Bayesian optimization for automated neurostimulation: future directions and challenges

RESEARCH

September 2020

Samuel Laferrière1,2, Marco Bonizzato3, Numa Dancause3, & Guillaume Lajoie1,4

The stimulation optimization problem & the rapid evolution of electrode technology:
The development of neurostimulation techniques for targeted biomarker control is an active area of research. New implantable devices are microfabricated with hundreds or thousands of electrodes, holding great potential for precise spatiotemporal stimulation. These interfaces not only serve as a crucial experimental tool to probe computation in neural circuits [7,8,9], but also have applications in neuroprostheses used to aid recovery of motor, sensory and cognitive modalities affected by injury or disease [14-19]. Yet, existing electrical neuromodulation interventions do not fully take advantage of the rich stimulation repertoire advanced electrode technologies offer, instead relying mostly on incomplete and manual input-output mapping, and often on single electrode stimulation [1,6].

What large-scale analysis tells us about EEG pre-processing

RESEARCH

September 2020

Kay Robbins1 Senior Member, IEEE and Tim Mullen2, Member IEEE

Although electroencephalography (EEG) is an important high time-resolution brain imaging technology used in laboratory, clinical, and even consumer applications, consistent handling of signal artifacts continues to be an important challenge. In a recent series of papers [1] [2] [3], we and collaborators compared EEG analysis results across multiple studies, EEG headset types, and preprocessing methods. We considered channel and source signal characteristics and explored time-locked event analysis. The work produced several insights of general interest to EEG researchers, as outlined below.