My thoughts on the standards emerged from TOBI project

I hope that my posts in the last two months provided you a bit more understanding of how the European projects develop, what are the standardization bodies and also made you interested in brain-computer interfaces. At this point I think it's time to move on, looking into other projects and applications about BCI.

Before that, I would like to share you my personal impressions on the standards I have presented so far, during these months. First of all, I admit that maybe the standards TiC, TiA and TiD are not the most representative for how standardization works in EU, since this project was not dedicated to create standards. Even though the standardization was somehow secondary and not what I expected in the beginning, I still find TOBI to be a very interesting project, with great contributions in the area of BCI.

I still have some questions that remain unanswered, due to the fact that most of the information that I have found about this project comes from its official website. Therefore, obviously there are not so many details about the process behind the standardization, focusing more on presenting the work they have achieved. During my research I have even tried to have some insight from the contact persons, but unfortunately I could not get an answer up to this point. One of the main things I wanted to know was if standardization through the official bodies of EU (such as CENELEC or ETSI) was taken into consideration at any point or if the interfaces were meant to be open source files from the beginning.

Regarding the future for this standards, my opinion is that they will not become de facto standards ( as a result of everyone adopting them), but they will help with the creation of other standards, including some parts of them. One aspects that concerns me about their success is that I could not find many references to them except the ones that come from TOBI and that information on them dropped significantly after the project ended.

I hope in my future posts I will refer to this project and its tools as a starting point for other applications in BCI. From this point the blog will focus more on applications and less on the standardization process.