Performance Comparison of Low-cost Hardware Platforms Targeting Physiological Computing Applications

Although the Arduino is currently the most popular low-cost hardware platform within the Do-it-Yourself (DiY) community, it is not designed taking into account the specific requirements of physiological computing. As a result of previous work by our group, a novel hardware framework for physiological computing, entitled BITalino, was proposed, to allow anyone to create their own projects and applications with biosignal sensors. In this work, we benchmark the Arduino and BITalino platforms, targeting the evaluation of their performance for the purpose of biosignals acquisition. We also describe a few physiological computing applications built with the BITalino, that show the potential of this platform within the engineering community.