Wow. I have my NextJS app streaming voltage measurements from my forehead.

This is so cool.

I'm going to start a new project and open-source it. I'll build it out in the open. Improve the experience of finding, pairing, and streaming data from the OpenBCI Ganglion.

I will also work on the UI. My UI is terrible. Graphs are always confusing. I want a single value that is showing what I care about!

Kind of like a heart rate monitor! It does all the heavy lifting for you and shows you the average bpm.

What would be a useful "bpm" for brain activity from a particular area of the brain? In this case, from my forehead?

I need to do a bit more digging on how I can measure these electrical signals and measure "attention" or "focus" and "calmness".

That's what Tero and Kimmo Karvinen (who wrote Make A Mind-Controlled Arduino Robot) did to make an Arduino car go and stop using EEG data.

Instead of making a car go and stop, I want to see my VPS (volts per-second?) oscillate.

I also wonder if I could test the quality of these signals. How?

What if... I bought a device that emits a voltage? What if I have a separate device that can measure the emitted voltage and then I compare the device's reading with my application's reading? That way I can test the quality of the streamed data!

Let me look into that.

I learned about waveform generators.

Waveform generators allow you to emit controlled electric currents.

Check out Siglent Technologies' Amazon shop. They sell 3 options that reliably emit electrical currents that could mock brain currents. This will help me test the quality of the algorithms used to display brain activity in my UI!

I also learned about head phantoms. Head phantoms are anatomically accurate plastic human heads that emit realistic electrical currents. Check out this PubMed article for more details.

I don't necessary want to build a "head phantom". But for sure something like it! Something I can quickly setup and use to test my algorithms.