Asynchronous EEG/ERP Acquisition for EEG Teleservices

The aging issue threatens to collapse health public systems in some regions of first world. Although telemedicine is one of the solutions to avoid people insti-tutionalization, it has severe limitations and not all medical services can be of-fered. While few years ago the electrical complexity and cost of EEG systems prevented execution of clinical EEG tests out of hospital, now services such as home-based video-EEG are possible. Conversely, some important clinical tests such as event-related potentials cannot be executed remotely. The reason for that is the accurate synchrony between local stimulus onset and remote starting of EEG acquisition. In hospital, synchrony is guaranteed by means of a wired connection between stimulus display that triggers EEG recording while in home-based testing this link normally does not exist. In this study we show an effective way to execute event-related potentials based on asynchronous EEG data transmission. We executed a dichotic listening paradigm with forced-attention modality. The user goal was to detect the attended audio sentence from the analysis of evoked auditory event-related potentials. The rate of successful detection in both synchronous and asynchronous modalities was compared and results revealed no significant difference. Our asynchronous approach can be used in on-line acquisition of home-based event-related potentials with remote processing.