ICAM: A Non-Invasive Low-Cost Wearable Device for Resource-Efficient Monitoring of Non-Convulsive Epileptic Seizures

Overview

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder affecting approximately 50 million people worldwide and involves repeated seizures from abnormal neuron firing. Around 60% of patients have non-convulsive seizures (NCS), which include focal aware and impaired awareness seizures. Because NCS lack visible motor symptoms, they require continuous scalp or invasive stereoelectroencephalography (EEG) monitoring, which is costly and mandates specialist oversight. Given these challenges, current methods remain inaccessible to 75% of patients in under-resourced countries. An alternative biomarker for NCS detection is ictal central apnea (ICA), the concurrent autonomic changes of respiratory arrest and heart-rate variability. The goal of ICAM is to develop a low-cost wearable device that detects ICA non-invasively through photoplethysmography (PPG) and respiratory surface electromyography (sEMG). To support low-compute environments, ICAM proposes a novel architecture called adaptive multi-scale Echo State Network (AMES-ESN), which was deployed on low-cost hardware for real-time ICA predictions from sEMG and PPG. ICA annotations from synthetic training data were clinically validated, exhibiting strong similarity to real EMG and PPG signals (RMSSD: 3.3 ms, RRD: 1.06 bpm). AMES-ESN exceeds engineering goals in efficiency on ICAM hardware (548% less memory than state-of-the-art) and performance across EEG vs EMG/PPG modalities by ±5% for precision, recall, and F1-Score (94.10% vs. 84.52% 1D-CNN-LSTM; 77.40% SVM; p<0.001), all while being ~210x cheaper than state-of-the-art ($111.72). This preventive technology will pave the path to accessible seizure monitoring and care, particularly in rural and underfunded communities, potentially saving the lives of millions who struggle with NCS.

Competition history

• CSEF 2026 Medicine & Physiology (Senior Division) · Entry S-15-05

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