Nocturnal Epileptic Seizures Detection Using Inertial and Muscular Sensors

Abstract

This paper presents a lightweight approach for the early detection of nocturnal epileptic seizures through analysis of inertial data and muscle contractions. Our approach uses an overlapping sliding window to derive the variance of data acquired by the MPU 9,250 motion tracking device and single channel surface ElectroMyoGram (sEMG). The Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) is used to forecast the current value of the data variance. When the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the forecasted and measured variances deviates from past values, a signal is transmitted to the base station to set the current counter in an alarm window. If the filling ratio of the alarm window is greater than a predefined threshold, an alarm is triggered by the base station. The proposed approach is intended to improve the performance of existing detection systems based on data analysis from Accelerometer. The MPU 9,250 is 9-axis motion tracking and used to detect motor seizures, and it contains a 3-axis Accelerometer, Gyroscope, and Magnetometer. The sEMG is used to detect silent seizures without jerky movements. Our experimental results on a real dataset from an epileptic patient show that our proposed approach is able to increase detection accuracy and reduce the low false alarm rate. Comparison with a Probability Density Function (PDF) further demonstrates the detection efficiency of our approach.