Suppressing Non-Stationary Motion Artefacts in Mobile EEG Using Generalized Eigenvalue Decomposition

Mobile EEG enables investigating brain activity during real-world behaviour, but remains susceptible to motion artefacts, limiting signal interpretability and the use of advanced analytical techniques. Methods developed for removing motion-related artefacts induced by periodic activity like cycling, walking or juggling showed degraded performance with increasing movement variability and speed. To fill this gap, we developed a method based on generalized eigenvalue decomposition (GED) to identify and suppress highly variable, non-periodic-especially transient-artefacts due to very rapid, free full body movements of different types, as they occur during sports practice. By leveraging the contrast between covariance matrices of artefactual and resting-state EEG segments, this approach isolates motion-related components for removal during multichannel EEG signal reconstruction. The method was validated on two ecological datasets featuring stereotyped head and body movements and dynamic table tennis. Comparison with state-of-the-art technique showed superior performance of our method in terms of signal-to-error ratio (SER), artefact-to-residue ratio (ARR), brain spectral power preservation and computation time. Sensitivity analysis was applied to demonstrate the method's robustness to parameter changes. These findings highlight the potential of the proposed method as a robust, generalizable approach for motion artefact suppression in mobile EEG, particularly when applied in extreme recording conditions like during active sports activity.