CAREER: Earable Systems: Enabling Ear-worn Sensing and Actuating Systems for Health Care and Brain-Computer Interactions

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The human head houses many important physiological signals such as brain signals (EEG), facial muscle signals (EMG), eye signals (EOG), etc. which have tremendous value in inferring the user's mental, physiological, and physical states. In addition, it also serves as an ideal body part for applying brain stimulations. However, most of the existing head-based sensing and stimulation methods are cumbersome, intrusive, and expensive, mostly suitable only for stationary and short-term usages such as in clinics or hospitals. This project aims to fill that gap by enabling a novel form of wearable sensing and actuating systems that can unobtrusively, continuously, comfortably, and simultaneously sense a multitude of head-based physiological signals and actuate to stimulate the brain while remaining minimally visible to the public. While the well-accepted form factors for wearable devices are watches, glasses, and other kinds of body-worn form factors, this work takes a drastically different approach, an ear-worn sensing and actuation approach (called Earable Systems) to tame a problem that has long hindered the deployment of head-based wearable systems, namely user acceptance, by making the wearable devices more socially acceptable and less visible to the public. The intellectual merit of this project stems from the key research activities. The activities include: formulating multiple head-based signal propagation models to and from human ears using superposition principle of wave propagation; developing algorithms, experimental hardware blocks, analytical models, and software libraries for sensing individual head-based physiological signals; developing closed-loop stimulation techniques, associated hardware, analytical tools, and safety guidelines for effective and safe just-in-time brain stimulation from the ears; and evaluating Earable Systems and the proposed platform in-lab for a compelling and practical application. This project's broader impacts stem from an integrated program of education, research and outreach that will translate the research results into demonstrations and hands-on experiences for under-served middle school students and local teachers through lab visits and summer workshops. It will also provide a unique interdisciplinary education for future engineering and healthcare workforce. It will also provide insight to future healthcare technologies through two Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for clinicians and undergraduate engineering students. And, both undergraduate and graduate students will be involved in advanced interdisciplinary healthcare projects using Earable Systems concepts. The research has the potential to translate scientific discovery and technical knowledge into beneficial commercial products through industry outreach and internships.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.