Epileptic seizure forecasting with wearable-based nocturnal sleep features

Non-invasive biomarkers have recently shown promise for seizure forecasting in people with epilepsy. In this work, we developed a seizure-day forecasting algorithm based on nocturnal sleep features acquired using a smart shirt.

Seventy-eight individuals with epilepsy admitted to the Centre hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal epilepsy monitoring unit wore the Hexoskin biometric smart shirt during their stay. The shirt continuously measures electrocardiography, respiratory, and accelerometry activity. Ten sleep features, including sleep efficiency, sleep latency, sleep duration, time spent in non-rapid eye movement sleep (NREM) and rapid eye movement sleep (REM), wakefulness after sleep onset, average heart and breathing rates, high-frequency heart rate variability, and the number of position changes, were automatically computed using the Hexoskin sleep algorithm. Each night's features were then normalized using a reference night for each patient. A support vector machine classifier was trained for pseudo-prospective seizure-day forecasting, with forecasting horizons of 16- and 24-h to include both diurnal and nocturnal seizures (24-h) or diurnal seizures only (16-h). The algorithm's performance was assessed using a nested leave-one-patient-out cross-validation approach.

Improvement over chance (IoC) performances were achieved for 48.7% and 40% of patients with the 16- and 24-h forecasting horizons, respectively. For patients with IoC performances, the proposed algorithm reached mean IoC, sensitivity and time in warning of 34.3%, 86.0%, and 51.7%, respectively for the 16-h horizon, and 34.2%, 64.4% and 30.2%, respectively, for the 24-h horizon.

Smart shirt-based nocturnal sleep analysis holds promise as a non-invasive approach for seizure-day forecasting in a subset of people with epilepsy. Further investigations, particularly in a residential setting with long-term recordings, could pave the way for the development of innovative and practical seizure forecasting devices.

Seizure forecasting with wearable devices may improve the quality of life of people living with epilepsy who experience unpredictable, recurrent seizures. In this study, we have developed a seizure forecasting algorithm using sleep characteristics obtained from a smart shirt worn at night by a large number of hospitalized patients with epilepsy (78). A daily seizure forecast was generated following each night using machine learning methods. Our results show that around half of people with epilepsy may benefit from such an approach.