Since the launch of the first consumer grade EEG measuring sensors ‘NeuroSky Mindset’ in 2007, the market has witnessed an introduction of at least one new product every year by competing manufacturers, which include NeuroSky, Emotiv, interaXon and OpenBCI. There are numerous variations in the make and versions, but these products clearly share the key selling points of affordability, portability, and ease of use. These features are patently well placed provided one of the main objectives for their development is to attract a new target group of commercial users. Nevertheless, with several decades of traditional EEG usage in clinical and experimental settings, the shift toward commercial and engineering sides has not been achieved without skepticism. With this in mind, researchers in related fields have been tirelessly working to ensure that these putatively novel features were not introduced at the expense of efficiency and accuracy by conducting validation studies to compare the performance of data derived from consumer grade EEG devices with ones from standard research grade counterparts. In this review, we seek to provide the detail of the products supplied by the major players, summarize studies that evaluate consumer product’s performance against research grade devices, the key areas of applications that these consumer grade devices have been employed in over the past five years or so, and finally give our perspectives on the limitations and what these innovative tools could offer going forward in terms of research and commercial applications.

中文翻译：

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消费级 EEG 测量传感器作为研究工具：综述

自 2007 年推出首款消费级 EEG 测量传感器“NeuroSky Mindset”以来，市场上的竞争制造商每年至少推出一款新产品，其中包括 NeuroSky、Emotiv、interaXon 和 OpenBCI。品牌和版本有很多变化，但这些产品显然具有可负担性、便携性和易用性的关键卖点。如果开发这些功能的主要目标之一是吸引新的商业用户目标群，那么这些功能显然处于有利地位。然而，随着数十年来传统 EEG 在临床和实验环境中的使用，向商业和工程方面的转变并非没有怀疑。考虑到这一点，相关领域的研究人员一直在不懈努力，通过进行验证研究来比较来自消费级 EEG 设备的数据与来自标准研究级对应设备的数据的性能，以确保不会以牺牲效率和准确性为代价引入这些假定的新功能。在这篇评论中，我们力求提供主要参与者提供的产品的详细信息，总结评估消费产品与研究级设备的性能的研究，这些消费级设备在过去五年中所采用的关键应用领域左右，最后给出我们对局限性的看法，以及这些创新工具在研究和商业应用方面可以提供什么。