Feasibility of Assessing Brain Activity using Mobile, In-home Collection of Electroencephalography: Methods and Analysis

The last decade has seen increased availability of mobile electroencephalography (EEG). These mobile systems enable researchers to conduct data collection “in-context,” reducing participant burden and potentially increasing diversity and representation of research samples. Our research team completed in-home data collection from more than 400 12-month-old infants from low-income backgrounds using a mobile EEG system. In this manuscript, we provide methodological and analytic guidance for the collection of high-quality, mobile EEG in infants. Specifically, we provide insights and recommendations for equipment selection, data collection, and data analysis, highlighting important considerations for selecting a mobile EEG system. Examples include the size of the recording equipment, electrode type, reference types, and available montages. We also highlight important recommendations surrounding preparing a non-standardized recording environment for EEG collection, obtaining informed consent from parents, instructions for parents during capping and recording, stimuli and task design, training researchers, and monitoring data as it comes in. Additionally, we provide access to analysis code and demonstrate the robustness of the data (e.g., split-half reliability) from a recent study using this approach. Finally, we provide recommendations and publicly available resources for future studies aiming to collect mobile EEG.