Detectie van nachtelijke epileptische convulsies bij pediatrische patiënten gebaseerd op accelerometers.

This project is focused on paediatric patients. This group has distinct convulsions (motor activity related to epilepsy) compared to adult patients and their convulsion frequency may still vary as a function of time. The registrations are performed at night as there is a reduced or no supervision of the caregiver then. Furthermore during sleep the convulsions occur more or less in a controlled reproducible manner without too much interference of other noise sources such as voluntary movement. The initial results (prrof-of-concept) were obtained on 3 patients. During motot convulsions, clearly distinguishable patterns were visible the ACM-signal. Furthermore it was observed that the clinical manifestations of a convulsion strongly vary between patients. Therefore a detection algorithm was developed that uses patient-specific prior knowledge. The aims of this project are (a) to validate and further refine the detection algorithm to reach a sensitivity of 90% and a false-positive rate of at most 3 per night in 20 paediatric patients with convulsions (epileptic seizures with motor component such as: tonic manifestations, tonic-clonic manifestations, jerks or other seizures with motor components); (b) to develop a wireless system for acquiring accelerometer data at home and (c) to investigate the therapeutic impact of having available an "objective" measure of the number of nocturnal seizures over a longer period of time.

Trefwoorden:Pediatric patients, Accelerometers, Epileptical convulsions