Abstract
Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a neuromodulation technique that is painless and noninvasive, has shown promising results in assisting patients suffering from brain injuries and psychiatric conditions. Recently, there has been an increased interest in home-based therapeutic applications in various areas. This study proposes a low-cost, internet of things (IoT)-based tDCS prototype that provides the basic tDCS features with internet connectivity to enable remote monitoring of the system's usage and adherence. An IoT-enabled microcontroller was programmed with C++ to supply a specific dose of direct current between the anode and cathode electrodes for a predefined duration. Each tDCS session's information was successfully synchronized with an IoT cloud server to be remotely monitored. The accuracy of the resulting stimulation currents was close to the expected values with an acceptable error range. The proposed IoT-based tDCS system has the potential to be used as a telerehabilitation approach to enhance safety and adherence to home-based noninvasive brain stimulation techniques.