I installed an accelerometer on the underside of the floorboard where my son sleeps to see if there is any chance of detecting him having an epileptic seizure by the vibrations induced in the floor.
Month: February 2013
Epileptic Seizure Detector (2)
Update to add another spectrum…
I have been working on setting up the Epileptic Seizure Detector. I tried wearing it for a while, and simulating the shaking associated with a tonic-clonic seizure. Some example spectra collected on the memory card are shown below:
Soldering onto Surface Mount ICs
I recently bought an accelerometer IC to use on my epileptic seizure detector project. It is a tiny surface mount device as you can see below.
Epileptic Seizure Detector (1)
Our son worried us a bit a couple of weeks ago when he had quite a nasty fit, so I have been thinking about making an alarm to warn a carer that a person in their charge is having a seizure.
There are a few different ways to do this that I have thought of:
- Detect Movement using an accelerometer
- Detect the sounds associated with the movement using a microphone
- Monitor the movement with a CCTV camera and use image processing to detect the abnormal movement.
- We do not want false alarms caused by normal movement – I am addressing this by using a fourier transform to filter out only a range of frequencies of movement, in the hope that I can select the characteristic shaking of a seizure, but not detect too much normal movement.
- A quick shake should not raise an alarm, so to set off an alarm the acceleration in the appropriate frequency band should be more than a threshold value for a specified length of time (3 sec currently). This will give a warning ‘pip’. If the shaking continues for 10 sec, it raises a buzzing alarm.
- Sensitivity will be a problem for detecting it through the floor – will need to work on that another evening.
The completed prototype is shown below: