Nocturnal Seizure Detection Using Off-the-Shelf WiFi

The detection of nocturnal seizures in epilepsy patients is essential, both for the quick management of the seizure complications, and for the assessment of the ongoing seizure treatment. Traditional seizure detection products (e.g., wearables), however, are either very costly, uncomfortable, or unreliable. In this article, we then propose to utilize everyday WiFi signals for robust, fast, and noninvasive detection of nocturnal seizures. We first present a new and rigorous mathematical characterization for the spectral content/bandwidth of the WiFi signal, measured on a WiFi device placed near a sleeping patient, during different kinds of sleep motions: seizures, normal movements (e.g., posture adjustments), and breathing. Based on this mathematical modeling, we propose a novel pipeline for processing the received WiFi signals to robustly detect all nocturnal nonbreathing movements, and then classify them into normal body movements or seizures. In order to validate this, we carry out extensive experiments in seven different typical bedroom locations, where a set of 20 actors simulate the state of having seizures (a total of 260 instances), as well as normal sleep movements (a total of 410 instances). Our proposed system detects 93.85% of the seizures with a mean response time (MRT) of only 5.69 s since the onset of the seizure. Moreover, our proposed system achieves a probability of false alarm of only 0.0097, when classifying normal sleep movements. Overall, our new mathematical modeling and experimental results show the great potential the ubiquitous WiFi signals have for detecting nocturnal seizures, which can provide better support for epilepsy patients and their caregivers.