One-third of patients suffering from chronic epilepsy, which is caused by abnormal brain activity, is drug-resistant. Animal models are widely used to study the mechanisms leading to epilepsy so better drug treatments can be developed for this disease. In such studies, epileptiform activity, assessed by LFP recordings, can be used as a marker for the development and chronification of disease. However, the analysis of LFP recordings is typically done manually, which is time-consuming, subject to observer bias, error-prone, and lacks consistency and efficiency. Therefore, we present a work which developed a new, automated detection and classification method for epileptiform activity, which was tested in the intrahippocampal kainic acid (IHKA) mouse model, a model of human temporal lobe epilepsy. Our method relies on a spike detector using an improved version of the nonlinear energy operator (NEO) in combination with automatic NEO thresholding (ANT). The detected spikes form the basis of epileptiform event detection and classification. The proposed method is implemented in Python as an automated and time-efficient algorithm that can be used in preclinical studies. Epileptiform event detection accuracy was 93.1% and classification accuracy 95.8%. Moreover, the time for analysis of LFP recordings was reduced by 98.8% compared to manual analysis. Additionally, to demonstrate the potential of the algorithm for application in Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMI), we performed a real-time implementation using both an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and a field programmable gate array (FPGA). The FPGA demonstrated the feasibility of real-time implementation, and the ASIC resulted in an area and power efficient chip using the Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company (TSMC) 45nm library that constitutes a post-layout area of 9114 µm2 and a power usage of 6.11 µW.

Epilepsy is a severe neurological disorder that affects every aspect of a patient’s life. Unfortunately, there is no complete cure for everyone on the market yet. However, a lot of work has been done on seizure prevention. The entire project details the proof of concept implementation of a secure and reliable MBAN (Medical Body Area Network) used for seizure prevention. The principal objective of the MBAN system is to set up and maintain secure connections between the nodes of the MBAN system and store and analyze the received data in the cloud. Therefore, a suitable gateway is needed, which is created in this work. The gateway concerns a mobile application constructed with the Flutter SDK. The main ability of the applicaton is to communicate with the implantable medical device, which in the demonstration is the node the gateway is connected to using BLE. The application is designed for Android and iOS and is connected to the AWS cloud service in which the data is stored and analyzed with a simple function that checks whether the received heart rate is above a certain threshold. This function can be easily replaced by a more extensive function. In addition, the application displays user health metrics such as the heart rate, connection state, and it can update the firmware of the implantable medical device. The security measures taken in this project concern setting up the BLE connection with an OOB (Out Of Band) channel for key sharing, after which the key is used to encrypt the data streams. Additionally, the data in the cloud is encrypted.