Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom.
J Neurosci Methods. 2024 Nov;411:110266. doi: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2024.110266. Epub 2024 Aug 24.
Computer controlled electrical stimulation of facial muscles is a promising method to study facial feedback effects, though little guidance is available for new adopters.
Facial Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation (fNMES) offers a spatially and temporally precise means of manipulating facial muscles during experiments, and can be combined with EEG to study the neurological basis of facial feedback effects. Precise delivery of stimulation requires hardware and software solutions to integrate stimulators and a stimulus-presenting computer. We provide open-source hardware schematics and relevant computer code in order to achieve this integration, so as to facilitate the use of fNMES in the laboratory.
Hardware schematics are provided for the building of a bespoke control module, which allows researchers to finely control stimulator output whilst participants complete computer tasks. In addition, we published code that new adopters of NMES can use within their experiments to control the module and send event triggers to another computer. These hard- and software solutions were successfully used to investigate the effects of facial muscle activation on felt and perceived emotion. We summarise these findings and discuss the integration of fNMES with EEG and peripheral physiological measures.
Our inexpensive hardware solution allows fNMES parameters to be computer controlled, and thus allows to stimulate facial muscles with high precision. This opens up new possibilities to investigate, for example, facial feedback effects.
We provide tools and guidance to build a control module in order to precisely deliver electrical stimulation to facial muscles using a stimulus computer (while recording EEG or other peripheral physiology).
电脑控制的面部肌肉电刺激是一种研究面部反馈效应的有前途的方法，尽管对于新采用者来说，指导很少。
面部神经肌肉电刺激（fNMES）提供了一种在实验中精确操纵面部肌肉的空间和时间方法，并且可以与 EEG 结合使用，以研究面部反馈效应的神经基础。精确的刺激传递需要硬件和软件解决方案来整合刺激器和刺激呈现计算机。我们提供开源硬件原理图和相关计算机代码，以实现这种集成，从而促进 fNMES 在实验室中的使用。
提供了用于构建定制控制模块的硬件原理图，该模块允许研究人员在参与者完成计算机任务时精细控制刺激器输出。此外，我们发布了新的 NMES 采用者可以在他们的实验中使用的代码，以控制模块并向另一台计算机发送事件触发器。这些硬件和软件解决方案成功用于研究面部肌肉激活对感觉和感知情绪的影响。我们总结了这些发现，并讨论了 fNMES 与 EEG 和外周生理测量的集成。
我们的廉价硬件解决方案允许计算机控制 fNMES 参数，从而可以高精度地刺激面部肌肉。这为研究面部反馈效应等提供了新的可能性。
我们提供了构建控制模块的工具和指导，以便使用刺激计算机（同时记录 EEG 或其他外周生理）精确地向面部肌肉传递电刺激。
