July 20, 2025
Like Electroencephalography (EEG), mobile EEG is a methodology which records brain activity using small sensors applied to the scalp, which pick up the electrical potentials produced by your brain. This allows researchers to measure the brain’s cognitive processes.
EEG has a high temporal resolution (milliseconds), allowing researchers to identify in a millisecond time range the changes in the patterns of brain activity of individuals when they are exposed to different stimuli, such as advertisements, brands or products. When used alongside traditional market research techniques, It answers the “why” beyond the “what”, evaluating cognitive processes such as attention, concentrated thinking, match/mismatch of events and arousal. For example, examining the front asymmetry in an EEG output can measure emotional engagement in response to an advert.
Mobile EEG, sometimes known as portable EEG, is a new technology which allows the measurement of electrical brain activity in real-time while participants move freely in natural environments. This can tell researchers when consumers’ brains process information within complex real-world environments, increasing the ecological validity of a study by taking the participant out of laboratory settings.
Mobile EEG is a powerful tool for understanding the unconscious drivers of consumer behaviour in the real world and can be used almost everywhere, such as outdoors, at home, practising sports and driving.
Often, mobile EEG is used simultaneously with field-of-view glasses or eye tracking to monitor the gaze of your participants and thereby mark the times of important events and the corresponding EEG measurements.
Brands within the FMCG sector have used mobile EEG to measure brain activity during a real-life shopper journey. Participants shop for items on a shopping list, providing insights into preferences towards the placement of product displays and motivations behind choosing a particular brand.
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