NeuraDock's EEG Workstation Wants to Read Your Mind — Via Accessible Electroencephalography

Shanghai-based startup NeuraDock is aiming to bring brainwave-reading technology to the masses with its eponymous NeuraDock EEG Workstation dry-electrode seven-channel electroencephalography kit.

"NeuraDock EEG Workstation is a 7-channel electroencephalography development kit for researchers, developers, and makers who want to build with brain signals," says NeuraDock's Zhiyuan Xu of the company's device. "It combines a lightweight dry-electrode headset, a compact acquisition module, software tools for recording, and an open-source AI [Artificial Intelligence] agent for signal analysis. The dry-electrode headset covers occipital and temporal regions, can be worn quickly, and the acquisition module streams multichannel EEG data in real time. The modular design also allows developers to integrate the core module into custom wearables, XR [Extended Reality] headsets, or interactive systems."

Electroencephalography is the measurement of electrical activity in the brain, working much like electromyography does for muscles: amplifying teeny-tiny signals picked up by electrodes. In the case of the NeuraDock, there are seven electrodes attached to a headband feeding readings to a Texas Instruments ADS1299 analog front-end that then feeds the amplified signals to a Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 to be streamed over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to a nearby computer for capture and analysis.

"A typical project might start with an idea for brain-driven interaction or an experiment using EEG signals. With many existing tools, developers first need to configure hardware, check electrode contact, set up data streaming, and write preprocessing code before they can test anything meaningful," Xu claims. "NeuraDock shortens this path by providing a ready-to-use hardware setup and a workflow that helps move from raw signals to usable data more efficiently. In practice, this means faster iteration. A team can put on the headset, verify signal quality, record data, and begin analysis or application development without rebuilding the same pipeline for every project."

The company is preparing to launch a crowdfunding campaign for the NeuraDock EEG Workstation in the near future, and pledges to release selected hardware design files under the weakly reciprocal variant of the CERN Open Hardware License Version 2, headset and enclosure CAD files under the reciprocal Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license, and the software development kit and tools under the permissive MIT license.

Interested parties can sign up on Crowd Supply to be notified when the campaign goes live.