Cross-disciplinary research experts develop Responsive Epilepsy Control System

The Brain Mind Welfare Team of National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Tainan, Taiwan, formed by cross-disciplinary research experts from information engineering, medical information and social science, has developed a Responsive Epilepsy Control System which proved to be successful in epileptic rats.

“Seizure is one of the most frequently-occurred nerve diseases. However, because approximately 25% of epileptic patients cannot be controlled by the current medication or surgical methods, their living quality of is seriously interfered.”

Students Yi-Cheng Liao and Yi-Chun Chen of NCKU Institute of Computer Science and Information Engineering have won Creative Application Excellence Award of 2010 Embedded Software Design Contest, and their achievements will appear in the journal, Instrumentation and Measurement, published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

The NCKU Responsive Epilepsy Control System developed by Brain Mind Welfare Team integrates the electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors, electrical stimulation, functional unit and wireless transmission module to successfully detect and suppress absence epilepsy and drug-induced epilepsy, with a detection rate of 92% to 99%, whether awake or asleep, and the ability to produce electrical stimulation within 0.6 second of seizure.

The Chair of NCKU Department of Institute of Cognitive Science, Prof. Fu-Zen Shaw, expressed, "Seizure is one of the most frequently-occurred nerve diseases. However, because approximately 25% of epileptic patients cannot be controlled by the current medication or surgical methods, their living quality of is seriously interfered."

Prof. Fu-Zen Shaw also stated, "The closed-loop deep brain stimulation is an innovative and effective alternative raised in recent years to detect seizure, give immediate electrical stimulation and suppress seizure. However, in addition to successfully detecting seizure, we still need to overcome interference, such as different states of sober, sleep and daily activities, reduce the rate of misjudgment and conduct immediate calculation in portable system."

Assistant Prof. David Chang of NCKU Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering pointed out, "So far, the team has proved the Responsive Epilepsy Control System successful. In the future, we hope to further minimize the entire system into one single system-on-chip and cooperate with Buddhist Tzu Chi General Hospital in Hualian to engage in clinical trials. It'll be great new for epileptic patients if the experiments proved to be successful in human body."