In monitoring the depth of anesthesia (DOA), the electroencephalography (EEG) signals of patients have been utilized during surgeries to diagnose their level of consciousness. Different entropy methods were applied to analyze the EEG signal and measure its complexity, such as spectral entropy, approximate entropy (ApEn) and sample entropy (SampEn). However, as a weak physiological signal, EEG is easily subject to interference from external sources such as the electric power, electric knives and other electrophysiological signal sources, which lead to a reduction in the accuracy of DOA determination. In this study, we adopt the multivariate empirical mode decomposition (MEMD) to decompose and reconstruct the EEG recorded from clinical surgeries according to its best performance among the empirical mode decomposition (EMD), the ensemble EMD (EEMD), and the complementary EEMD (CEEMD) and the MEMD. Moreover, according to the comparison between SampEn and ApEn in measuring DOA, the SampEn is a practical and efficient method to monitor the DOA during surgeries at real time.

Entropy as an estimate of complexity of the electroencephalogram is an effective parameter for monitoring the depth of anesthesia (DOA) during surgery. Multiscale entropy (MSE) is useful to evaluate the complexity of signals over different time scales. However, the limitation of the length of processed signal is a problem due to observing the variation of sample entropy (S_E) on different scales. In this study, the adaptive resampling procedure is employed to replace the process of coarse-graining in MSE. According to the analysis of various signals and practical EEG signals, it is feasible to calculate the S_E from the adaptive resampled signals, and it has the highly similar results with the original MSE at small scales. The distribution of the MSE of EEG during the whole surgery based on adaptive resampling process is able to show the detailed variation of S_E in small scales and complexity of EEG, which could help anesthesiologists evaluate the status of patients.

Falls are unpredictable accidents and resulting injuries can be serious to the elderly. A preventative solution can be the use of vibration stimulus of white noise to improve the sense of balance. In this work, a pair of vibration shoes were developed and controlled by a touch-type switch which can generate mechanical vibration noise to stimulate the patient’s feet while wearing the shoes. In order to evaluate the balance stability and treatment effect of vibrating insoles in these shoes, multivariate multiscale entropy (MMSE) algorithm is applied to calculate the relative complexity index of reconstructed center of pressure (COP) signals in antero-posterior and medio-lateral directions by the multivariate empirical mode decomposition (MEMD). The results show that the balance stability of 61.5% elderly subjects is improved after wearing the developed shoes, which is more than 30.8% using multiscale entropy. In conclusion, MEMD-enhanced MMSE is able to distinguish the smaller differences between before and after the use of vibration shoes in both two directions, which is more powerful than the empirical mode decomposition (EMD)-enhanced MSE in each individual direction.