IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2016 - 126

Standards

EXG Standards Pertaining to
CE Society Fields of Interest
By Narisa N.Y. Chu

T

he fields of interest chartered by
the IEEE Consumer Electronics
(CE) Society cover a wide range
of topics. The advanced standards
developed for CE usage are mostly interdisciplinary, cutting across the boundaries
of many IEEE Societies. Multidisciplinary engineers are discussing and pursuing a perspective of the past, present,
and future standards development
pertaining to CE, with an impact from
other Societies. Conveying the up-andcoming standards activities will not be
one person's or one organization's effort.
It requires solid management experience, technology and market foresight,
and open-minded compromises between
the innovators and the status-quo
incumbents plus other relevant professionals in between.
Let's begin by discussing the electronics that a consumer uses in his or her
daily life. A consumer thinks, breathes,
sees, hears, touches, and moves about
while doing chores. Health care is important to a consumer, thus EXG data as
extraction technology has become readily
available for processing, transmission,
storage, and application development for
personal betterment. Biometric signals
denoted as EXG (X can be C, E, K, M,
and O) represent electroencephalography
(EEG), electrocardiography (ECG/EKG),
electromyography (EMG), electrooculography (EOG), and other known forms of
signal collection mechanisms, including
functional magnetic resonance imaging,
galvanic skin response, magnetoencephaDigital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2016.2590240
Date of publication: 22 September 2016

126 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

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lography, and near-infrared spectroscopy
for signal measurements of the brain,
heart, muscle, eye, motion, skin, and
pharmaceutical intake, respectively.
These electronic, magnetic, or optical
signals that reflect human biometric conditions have been stored primarily locally
and also privately. Sharing across the
Internet for purposes beyond limited rehabilitation and wellness is the intent first
taken by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) Standards Working Group
R6 SC4 WG3. Since 16 September 2015,
a series of standards has been proposed to
the CTA Standards Subcommittee on
Healthcare Working Group R6 SC4 WG3
[4], with the goal of eventually propagating to IEEE.
Neuroscience is still far from the
definitive interpretation of any of these
signals regarding economic usage in
medicine or daily life. However, consumer technology development has been
nonstop since the last decade and has
taken advantage of new findings related
to these signals, miniaturized integrated
circuits, and a broad gamut of applications, including rehabilitation, stress
management, special education, games,
entertainment, and Internet marketing.
Efforts to pioneer the standardization
of EXG signal data collection and transmission have been initiated from Southern California since September 2015
[1]. A few obvious questions remain to
be answered.
1) Is EXG a source, symptom, or noise
that connects to and directs a person's brain?
2) What is the role of hundreds of
sophisticated brain signal-processing

OCTOBER 2016

algorithms [2], [3] in brain interpretation when simple sensor electronics are applied to consumers?
3) What is the reliability of consumer
brain headsets [e.g., InteraXon Muse
(http://www.choosemuse.com),
Melon (http://www.thinkmelon.com),
and NeuroSky MindWave Mobile
(http://neurosky.com/biosensors/
eeg-sensor), among others] that have
emerged in entertainment and education outside of the laboratory/hospital-controlled environment?
4) What do we gain by standardizing
EXG?
5) What is the privacy issue with respect to mining personal EXG signals (see the Center for Responsible
Brainwave Technologies at http://
www.responsiblebraintech.org)?
The answers to these questions vary
depending on whether the opinions are
derived from academia or industry. It is
my belief that the standardization would
accelerate the brain research and development of the last 50 years, particularly
to benefit the growing aged population.
A few protocols developed for opensource access (see the Swartz Center for
Computational Neuroscience, University
of California, San Diego, at http://sccn.
ucsd.edu) have been incorporated into
smartphone applications, and they are
the primary candidates for standardization. The first protocol (i.e., CTA-2060)
is extensible data formatting (XDF)
(https://github.com/sccn/xdf). Others,
including lab streaming layer (LSL),
hierarchical event descriptor (HED), and
EGG study schema (ESS), are in the
project pipeline of CTA R6 SC4 WG3
http://www.choosemuse.com http://www.thinkmelon.com http://www.neurosky.com/biosensors/ http://http:// http://www.responsiblebraintech.org http://sccn http://www.ucsd.edu https://www.github.com/sccn/xdf
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2016
