Area of work and related standards

As we have seen by now the main goal of the project under study is not the standardization process itself, but creating new tools or concepts in order to improve BCI technology. The focus was mainly on the interoperability between systems in different areas such as research, industry and healthcare.

Because we are interested in non-invasive techniques, the signals we are dealing with are mainly EEG (electroencephalogram), MEG (magnetoencephalogram) or NIRS (near-infrared spectroscopy). The methods used to acquire and process this signals may vary from unit to unit and that clearly affects the innovation and evolution in BCI. In fact, one of the entries on the forum of the project it was mentioned that implementation differences were an important challenge to overcome even between the partners. Many of them used their own techniques or implementation methods, fact that led to communication and interoperability problems. 

TOBI set the goal to facilitate interoperability between:

• Different types of acquisition equipment
• Different types of BCI systems
• BCI systems and applications

In order to overcome all these differences TOBI provides the following software standards:

• TiA - standard for data acquisition
• TiC - standard for BCI output
• TiD - standard for markers and events

In addition to these standards the project provides a standard communication protocol.
In future posts a short description for each of this standards will be provided.