Quantifying the feasibility of compressive sensing in portable electroencephalography systems

The EEG for use in augmented cognition produces large amounts of compressible data from multiple electrodes mounted on the scalp. This huge amount of data needs to be processed, stored and transmitted and consumes large amounts of power. In turn this leads to physically large EEG units with limited lifetimes which limit the ease of use, and robustness and reliability of the recording. This work investigates the suitability of compressive sensing, a recent development in compression theory, for providing online data reduction to decrease the amount of system power required. System modeling which incorporates a review of state-of-the-art EEG suitable integrated circuits shows that compressive sensing offers no benefits when using an EEG system with only a few channels. It can, however, lead to significant power savings in situations where more than approximately 20 channels are required. This result shows that the further investigation and optimization of compressive sensing algorithms for EEG data is justified.