Assessing the Feasibility of Acoustic Based Seizure Detection

Long-term monitoring of epilepsy patients outside of hospital settings is impractical due to the complexity and costs associated with electroencephalogram (EEG) systems. Alternative sensing modalities that can acquire, and automatically interpret signals through easy-to-use wearable devices, are needed to help with at-home management of the disease. In this paper, a novel machine learning algorithm is presented for detecting epileptic seizures using acoustic physiological signals acquired from the neck using a wearable device.

Acoustic signals from an existing database, were processed, to extract their Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) which were used to train RUSBoost classifiers to identify ictal and non-ictal acoustic segments. A postprocessing stage was then applied to the segment classification results to identify seizures episodes.

Tested on 667 hours of acoustic data acquired from 15 patients with at least one seizure, the algorithm achieved a detection sensitivity of 88.1% (95% CI: 79%-97%) from a total of 36 seizures, out of which 24 had no motor manifestations, with a FPR of 0.83/h, and a median detection latency of -42 s.

The results demonstrated for the first time the ability to identify seizures using acoustic internal body signals acquired on the neck.

The results of this paper validate the feasibility of using internal physiological sounds for seizure detection, which could potentially be of use for the development of novel, wearable, very simple to use, long term monitoring, or seizure detection systems; circumventing the practical limitations of EEG monitoring outside hospital settings, or systems based on sensing modalities that work on convulsive seizures only.