LIBS: A bioelectrical sensing system from human ears for staging whole-night sleep study

Sensing physiological signals from the human head has long been used for medical diagnosis, human-computer interaction, meditation quality monitoring, among others. However, existing sensing techniques are cumbersome and not desirable for long-term studies and impractical for daily use. Due to these limitations, we explore a new form of wearable systems, called LIBS, that can continuously record biosignals such as brain wave, eye movements, and facial muscle contractions, with high sensitivity and reliability. Specifically, instead of placing numerous electrodes around the head, LIBS uses a minimal number of custom-built electrodes to record the biosignals from human ear canals. This recording is a combination of three signals of interest and unwanted noise. Therefore, we design an algorithm using a supervised Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) model to split the single-channel mixed signal into three individual signals representing electrical brain activities (EEG), eye movements (EOG), and muscle contractions (EMG). Through prototyping and implementation over a 30 day sleep experiment conducted on eight participants, our results prove the feasibility of concurrently extracting separated brain, eye, and muscle signals for fine-grained sleep staging with more than 95% accuracy. With this ability to separate the three biosignals without loss of their physiological information, LIBS has a potential to become a fundamental in-ear biosensing technology solving problems ranging from self-caring health to non-health and enabling a new form of human communication interfaces.