EZcap: A Novel Wearable for Real-Time Automated Seizure Detection From EEG Signals

Abstract

Epileptic seizures present a serious danger to the lives of their victims, rendering them unconscious, lacking control, and may even result in death only a few seconds after onset. This gives rise to a crucial need for an effective seizure detection method that is fast, accurate, and has the potential for mass market adoption. Kriging methods have a good reputation for high accuracy in spatial prediction, hence, their extensive use in geostatistics. This paper demonstrates the successful application of Kriging methods for an effective seizure detection device in an edge computing environment by modeling the brain as a spatial panorama. We hereby propose a novel wearable for real-time automated seizure detection from EEG signals using three different types of Kriging, namely, Simple Kriging, Ordinary Kriging and Universal Kriging. After multiple experiments with electroencephalogram (EEG) signals obtained from seizure patients as well as those from their healthy counterparts, the results reveal that the three Kriging methods performed very well in accuracy, sensitivity and latency of detection. It was found however, that Simple Kriging outperforms the other Kriging methods with a mean seizure detection latency of 0.81 sec, a perfect specificity, an accuracy of 97.50% and a sensitivity of 94.74%. The results in this paper compare well with other seizure detection models in the literature but their excellent seizure detection latency surpasses the performance of most existing works in seizure detection.