The NIRS Cap: Key Part of Emerging Wearable Brain-Device Interfaces

Nowadays, near‐infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) fills a niche in medical imaging due to various reasons including non‐invasiveness and portability. The special characteristics of NIRS imaging make it suitable to handle topics that were only approachable using electroencephalography (EEG) such as imaging infants and children; or studying the human brain activity during actions, like walking and drawing that require a certain amount of freedom that non‐portable devices such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) cannot permit. This chapter discusses the unique advantages of NIRS as a functional imaging method and the main obstacles that still prevent this technology from becoming a prominent medical imaging tool. In particular, in this chapter we focus on the design of the brain‐device interface: the NIRS cap and its important role in the imaging process.