A Sleep Monitor For Minimum Outlay

There are a variety of instruments used in sleep studies to measure bodily activity during sleep and consequent sleep quality. Many of them use techniques that perhaps aren’t so easy to replicate on the bench, but an EEG or electroencephalograph to measure brain waves can be achieved using a readily-available module. [Ben Jabituya] shows us a sleep monitor using one of these modules, an EGG Mikroe Click.

The brains of the operation is an Adafruit Adalogger Feather M0, which is hooked up to a headband containing the sensing electrodes. The write-up gives us a round-up of the available boards, which should be handy for any experimenters in this field. The firmware meanwhile was written using the Arduino IDE. It collects raw sampling data to an SD card, and one surprise comes in just how relatively small a space it requires to store a night’s results.

Finally, a Python script was used to process the data and turn it into a spectrogram to look at brain activity through the night. He envisages using the device for triggering lucid dreaming during REM sleep, but we can see it might be rather useful for sleep disorder sufferers, too. Take a look at it in the video below the break.

9 thoughts on “A Sleep Monitor For Minimum Outlay

  1. What surprises me is that there isn’t something better (quieter, simpler) for the front end amp.
    Someone needs to do an open source update to this sort of thing.
    The INA114 is at least 30 years old. Amplifier design has gotten better.
    New zero drift parts are quieter in the mid-band and have no 1/f noise.

    1. Well… We already seen how much people unwilling to change their favorite “jelly beans” to something more modern even it x100 times better and x10 times cheaper (open source hardware such as OpenBCI can be prime example).
      I mean current “chip shortage” should be renamed to “old crap shortage nobody should even use in the first place, unless it’s all they have on hand and buying a new one make no sense”.

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