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Automatic detection of signalling behaviour from assistance dogs as they forecast the onset of Epileptic seizures in humans

Raju, Hitesh, Sharma, Ankit, Smeaton, Aoife and Smeaton, Alan F. orcid logoORCID: 0000-0003-1028-8389 (2023) Automatic detection of signalling behaviour from assistance dogs as they forecast the onset of Epileptic seizures in humans. In: The 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC ’23), 27-30 Mar 2023, Tallinn, Estonia. ISBN 978-1-4503-9517-5

Abstract
Epilepsy or the occurrence of epileptic seizures, is one of the world's most well-known neurological disorders affecting millions of people. Seizures mostly occur due to non-coordinated electrical discharges in the human brain and may cause damage, including collapse and loss of consciousness. If the onset of a seizure can be forecast then the subject can be placed into a safe environment or position so that self-injury as a result of a collapse can be minimised. However there are no definitive methods to predict seizures in an everyday, uncontrolled environment. Previous studies have shown that pet dogs have the ability to detect the onset of an epileptic seizure by scenting the characteristic volatile organic compounds exuded through the skin by a subject prior a seizure occurring and there are cases where assistance dogs, trained to scent the onset of a seizure, can signal this to their owner/trainer. In this work we identify how we can automatically detect the signalling behaviours of trained assistance dogs and use this to alert their owner. Using data from an accelerometer worn on the collar of a dog we describe how we gathered movement data from 11 trained dogs for a total of 107 days as they exhibited signalling behaviour on command. We present the machine learning techniques used to accurately detect signalling from routine dog behaviour. This work is a step towards automatic alerting of the likely onset of an epileptic seizure from the signalling behaviour of a trained assistance dog.
Metadata
Item Type:Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Event Type:Conference
Refereed:Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords:Epileptic seizure; seizure-alert dogs; animal signalling behaviour; wearable accelerometer; feature selection; machine learning
Subjects:Computer Science > Artificial intelligence
Computer Science > Machine learning
Medical Sciences > Health
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing > School of Computing
Research Institutes and Centres > INSIGHT Centre for Data Analytics
Published in: SAC '23: Proceedings of the 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing. . Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). ISBN 978-1-4503-9517-5
Publisher:Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Official URL:https://doi.org/10.1145/3555776.3577656
Copyright Information:© 2023 The Authors.
Funders:Science Foundation Ireland
ID Code:28160
Deposited On:27 Mar 2023 11:04 by Alan Smeaton . Last Modified 20 Jun 2023 15:07
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