Advanced multi-paRametric Monitoring and analysis for diagnosis and Optimal management of epilepsy and Related brain disorders (ARMOR)

Framework: FP7 — Cooperation
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Destination: ICT for Health, Ageing Well, Inclusion and Governance
Action type: Collaborative project
Countries involved: Spain,Greece,United Kingdom,Germany,Cyprus
Call:  (FP7-ICT-2011-7, 2011)
Start date: 2011-11-01
End date: 2015-04-30
Duration (months): 42.0
Total project cost (EUR): 4312972.0
EU funding (EUR): 3186935.0
Participants: 9
Project status: CLOSED

Epilepsy, the propensity for recurrent, unprovoked epileptic seizures, is the most common serious neurological disorder, affecting over 50 million people worldwide. Epileptic seizures manifest with a wide variety of motor, cognitive, affective, and autonomic symptoms and signs and associated changes in the electrical activities of the brain (EEG), heart (ECG), muscles (EMG), skin (GSR), as well as changes in other important measurable biological parameters, such as respiration and blood pressure. Their recognition and full understanding is the basis for their optimal management and treatment, but presently is unsatisfactory in many respects. Epileptic seizures occur unpredictably and typically outside hospital and are often misdiagnosed as other episodic disturbances such as syncope, psychogenic and sleep disorders, with which they may co-exist, blurring the clinical presentation; on the other hand, costs of hospital evaluation are substantial, frequently without the desirable results, due to suboptimal monitoring capabilities. Reliable diagnosis requires state of the art monitoring and communication technologies providing real-time, accurate and continuous brain and body multi-parametric data measurements, suited to the patient's medical condition and normal environment and facing issues of patient and data security, integrity and privacy. In this project we will manage and analyse a large number of already acquired and new multimodal and advanced technology data from brain and body activities of epileptic patients and controls (MEG, multichannel EEG, video, ECG, GSR, EMG, etc) aiming to design ARMOR, a more holistic, personalized, medically efficient and economical monitoring system. New methods and tools will be developed for multimodal data pre-processing and fusion of information from various sources. Novel approaches for large scale analysis (both real-time and offline) of multi-parametric streaming and archived data will be introduced to discover patterns and associations between external indicators and mental states, detect correlations among parallel observations, and identify vital signs changing significantly. Moreover methods for automatically summarizing results and efficiently managing medical data will be developed. ARMOR will incorporate models derived from data analysis based on already existing communication platform solutions emphasising on security and ethical issues and performing required adaptations to meet specifications. Special effort will be devoted in areas such as data anonymization and provision of required service. ARMOR will provide flexible monitoring optimized for each patient and will be tested in several case studies and evaluated as a wide use ambulatory monitoring tool for seizures efficient diagnosis and management including possibilities for detecting premonitory signs and feedback to the patient.

Keywords: personal health,systems,intelligent systems,analysis of multi-parametric data,epilepsy,brain disorders