HealthSOS: Real-Time Health Monitoring System for Stroke Prognostics

Electroencephalography (EEG) is immediate and sensitive to cortical impairment resulting from ischemic stroke and is considered as the potential predictive tool of stroke onset, and post-stroke clinical management. Brainwave monitoring outside the heavily equipped clinical environment demands a low-cost, portable, and wearable EEG system. This study aims to assess the feasibility of using an ambulatory EEG system to classify the stroke patient group with neurological changes due to ischemic stroke and the control healthy adult group. HealthSOS, a real-time health monitoring system for stroke prognostics, is proposed here, which consists of an eye-mask embedded portable EEG device, data analytics, and medical ontology based health advisor service. This system was investigated with 37 stroke patients (mean age 71.6 years, 61% male) admitted in the emergency unit of a hospital and 36 healthy elderly volunteers (mean age 76 years, 28% male). EEG was recorded in resting-state using the portable device with frontal cortical electrodes (Fp1, Fp2) embedded in an eye-mask within 120 h after the onset of symptoms of ischemic stroke (confirmed clinically). The EEG data acquisition of the left and right brain hemispheres was done for at least 15 minutes in the awake resting state while subjects laid down on the bed. The statistical result shows that the revised brain symmetry index (rsBSI), the delta-alpha ratio, and the delta-theta ratio of the stroke group differ significantly from those of the healthy control group. In the machine learning analysis, the support vector machine (SVM) model shows the highest accuracy (Overall accuracy: 92%) and the highest Gini coefficient (95%) in classification performance. This study will be useful for early stroke prognostics and the management of post-stroke treatment.