Brain Monitoring Devices in Neuroscience Clinical Research: The Potential of Remote Monitoring Using Sensors, Wearables, and Mobile Devices

Abstract

The increasing miniaturization and affordability of sensors and circuitry has led to the current level of innovation in the area of wearable and microsensor solutions for health monitoring. This facilitates the development of solutions that can be used to measure complex health outcomes in nonspecialist and remote settings. In this article, we review a number of innovations related to brain monitoring including portable and wearable solutions to directly measure brain electrical activity, and solutions measuring aspects related to brain function such as sleep patterns, gait, cognition, voice acoustics, and gaze analysis. Despite the need for more scientific validation work, we conclude that there is enough understanding of how to implement these approaches as exploratory tools that may provide additional valuable insights due to the rich and frequent data they produce, to justify their inclusion in clinical study protocols.