Wireless And Portable Daily Soundscape Monitoring System For Auditory Profiling: Diagnostic Tool For Alzheimer’s Disease

摘要

The purpose of this paper is to develop an inexpensive, wearable, and portable monitoring system with wireless capabilities for signal acquisition of the user’s surrounding soundscape and electroencephalography (EEG). The end-goal of this device is to monitor high-risk populations that are developing into earlier stages of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Currently, the development of such device is still within preliminary phase and has only been tested in healthy individuals. Future applications of our monitoring system may be used as a non-invasive and inexpensive diagnostic tool for early detection of AD, potentially paving a new platform for therapeutic intervention. The system consists of low-weight bearing components, including an analog front-end and a single-board computer. The analog front-end contains three independent EEG, reference, bias, and auditory recording channels. The single-board computer timestamps and encrypts the incoming channels prior to local or "cloud" storage. Cloud storage provides ease-of-access and offline data analysis without the need to physically extract the data from the monitoring system. A portable/rechargeable battery provides power to the entire monitoring system for over 4 hours of operation. A graphical user-interface (GUI) was developed for secured remote access to data, parameter settings, and system configurations. The performance of the system was tested by measuring the frequency following response (FFR) in the captured EEG signals with respect to periodic auditory stimuli.