EPILEPSIAE is an acronym that stands for “Evolving Platform for Improving Living Expectation of Patients Suffering from IctAl Events”. It is an EU financed project (FP7-ICT -2007 5.1 Advanced ICT for Risk Assessment and Patient Safety, G.A. No 211713) that involves 4 partners in a consortium: MICROMED S.p.A. (Italy), the FCTUC university of Coimbra-Portugal, the CNRS of Paris and the FDM university of Freiburg, Germany. Also the university clinics of Coimbra, Paris-Salpetriere and Universitätsklinikum of Freiburg participate to the project.
The ambitious aims of the project are: to build a very large database on Eplilepsy, identify a class of algorithms capable to forecast a seizure incoming and eventually build a hardware device to alert patients before the seizure. This would greatly help these people to improve their life quality.
An important aspect of this project is the wireless capability of the acquisition system. During the clinical characterization of the seizure (focus and dynamic evolution) it would be important to reduce the impact to the patient mobility while keeping him/her monitored. As the energy budget is very low, only a couple of AA batteries to acquire 64 channels at 2048Hz sampling rate for many hours (LTM-EU device), the Bluetooth technology was chosen.
The limited range of Bluetooth link forced us to experiment different solution to cover wide areas as inside a clinic department. The BlueGiga roaming solution, with its Access Server points, seems the best promising solution.
This kind of wireless network topology will be installed for the experimental phase during 2010 year.
For more information visit: www.epilepsiae.eu