I haven’t seen a tDCS device that was truly wearable, most of them are a separate clunky box with all the circuitry in them. Most of the time tDCS is used, people deploy it along the same modalities as EEG, including “montages” along the 10-20 locations. What if instead we miniaturized the entire thing down to a few inches square, and designed it to sit on the head as part of the cap?
This is probably super doable, biggest problem is we can’t avoid the batteries being clunky. Could control it via a bluetooth/WiFi connection if we use something like an ESP32 as the controller. Because we don’t have to worry about muscle/movement noise like we do with EEG, I could see something like this being really popular in athletic training or musical instrument learning.
What about specs though? Since tDCS appears to be very dose dependent, do we allow cranking up to 8mA, even though people with sensitive or resistive skin might see burns over 2mA? Hrm…
Would also deploy with MUCH smaller electrodes than commonly used, like no more than 10mm2? Would something like a perforated swimming cap work here, can feed the leads through the eyelets?
An interesting benefit to this approach is we can also measure resistance at the placement more accurately, and PID the current based on that. This would means we could automagically adjust the current below a thresh hold to prevent adverses like burns, and it would all be based entirely on the user’s physiology. So if someone was more dehydrated one day (or became more dehydrated over the course of use) we could head off a lot of the adverse effects.
For people who get headaches, there’s nothing we can really do about that, there’s a metabolic limit to how much you can crank methylation rates and the headaches/”inflammation” are protective.
Off the top of my head, the BOM for something like this would come to under $100 if we used a decent quality cap. It makes me wonder if something like this would also be useful for conditions like epilepsy control or as a dementia treatment.
Man I wish we had a more readily available imaging modality, it’s a real killer that imaging is such a pain the ass to obtain.
I’m thinking as a research tool, this might open up entirely new methods by allowing the use of tDCS in a far more naturalistic environment.
I found a few commercial products which are interesting reference points: Focus V3 – has roughly the same form factor as the control unit I have in mind, just imagine this as part of the cap. Flow Neuroscience – this unit is somewhat similar, but is restricted to a hemispherical application and only targets the frontal to motor cerebral cortexes (also it’s too bulky and can’t be used for any application where the head moves around more than a bit).
Should I prioritize this or is it a softer idea than I think? Am I missing something?