An emergency call system for patients in locked-in state using an SSVEP-based brain switch.
Patients in a locked-in state (LIS) due to severe neurological disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) require seamless emergency care by their caregivers or guardians. However, it is a difficult job for the guardians to continuously monitor the patients' state, especially when direct communication is not possible. In the present study, we developed an emergency call system for such patients using a steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based brain switch. Although there have been previous studies to implement SSVEP-based brain switch system, they have not been applied to patients in LIS, and thus their clinical value has not been validated. In this study, we verified whether the SSVEP-based brain switch system can be practically used as an emergency call system for patients in LIS. The brain switch used for our system adopted a chromatic visual stimulus, which proved to be visually less stimulating than conventional checkerboard-type stimuli but could generate SSVEP responses strong enough to be used for brain-computer interface (BCI) applications. To verify the feasibility of our emergency call system, 14 healthy participants and 3 patients with severe ALS took part in online experiments. All three ALS patients successfully called their guardians to their bedsides in about 6.56 seconds. Furthermore, additional experiments with one of these patients demonstrated that our emergency call system maintains fairly good performance even up to 4 weeks after the first experiment without renewing initial calibration data. Our results suggest that our SSVEP-based emergency call system might be successfully used in practical scenarios.
['Lim|Jeong-Hwan|JH|', 'Kim|Yong-Wook|YW|', 'Lee|Jun-Hak|JH|', 'An|Kwang-Ok|KO|', 'Hwang|Han-Jeong|HJ|', 'Cha|Ho-Seung|HS|', 'Han|Chang-Hee|CH|', 'Im|Chang-Hwan|CH|http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3795-3318']
D000328:Adult D000690:Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis D001921:Brain D062207:Brain-Computer Interfaces D004630:Emergencies D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual D005260:Female D006801:Humans D008297:Male D008875:Middle Aged D011782:Quadriplegia D055815:Young Adult
emergency call system brain switch amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) brain-computer interface (BCI) EEG steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)