Wearable epilepsy seizure detection on FPGA with spiking neural networks

Busia, Paola

;Leone, Gianluca;Matticola, Andrea;Raffo, Luigi;Meloni, Paolo

2025-01-01

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Abstract

The development of epilepsy monitoring solutions suitable for everyday use is a very challenging task, where different constraints should be combined, resulting from the required accuracy standards, the unobtrusiveness of the monitoring device, and the efficiency of real-time operation. Considering the time-varying nature of the electroencephalography signal (EEG), Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) represent a promising solution to model the evolution of the brain state based on the history of the previously processed signal. This work proposes an extremely lightweight SNN-based seizure detection solution, utilizing a simple encoding scheme to ensure high levels of sparsity. Despite the reduced complexity, the model provides a detection performance comparable with the state-of-the-art SNN-based approaches on the evaluated data from the CHB-MIT dataset, reaching a 96% area under the curve (AUC) and allowing 99.3% average accuracy, with the detection of 100% of the examined seizure events and a false alarm rate of 0.3 false positives per hour. The suitability for real-time inference execution on wearable monitoring devices was assessed on SYNtzulu, demonstrating 0.5 μs inference time with 4.55 nJ energy consumption.