Stroke is the third highest cause of death worldwide after cancer and heart disease, and the number of stroke diseases due to aging is set to at least triple by 2030. As the top three causes of death worldwide are all related to chronic disease, the importance of healthcare is increasing even more. Models that can predict real-time health conditions and diseases using various healthcare services are attracting increasing attention. Most diagnosis and prediction methods of stroke for the elderly involve imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). It is difficult to rapidly and accurately diagnose and predict stroke diseases due to the long testing times and high costs associated with MRI. Thus, in this paper, we design and implement a health monitoring system that can predict the precursors of stroke diseases in the elderly in real time during daily walking. First, raw electroencephalography (EEG) data from six channels were preprocessed via Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). The raw EEG power values were then extracted from the raw spectra: alpha (), beta (), gamma (), delta (), and theta () as well as the low , high , and to ratio, respectively. The experiments in this paper confirm that the important features of EEG biometric signals alone during walking can accurately determine stroke precursors and occurrence in the elderly with more than 90% accuracy. Further, the Random Forest algorithm with quartiles and Z-score normalization validates the clinical significance and performance of the system proposed in this paper with a 92.51% stroke prediction accuracy. The proposed system can be implemented at a low cost, and it can be applied for early disease detection and prediction using the precursor symptoms of real-time stroke. Furthermore, it is expected that it will be able to detect other diseases such as cancer and heart disease in the future.
Physiological signals are immediate and sensitive to neural and cardiovascular change resulting from brain stimulation, and are considered as a quantifying tool with which to evaluate the association between brain stimulation and cognitive performance. Brain stimulation outside a highly equipped, clinical setting requires the use of a low-cost, ambulatory miniature system. The purpose of this double-blind, randomized, sham-controlled study is to quantify the physiological biomarkers of the neural and cardiovascular systems induced by a microwave brain stimulation (MBS) device. We investigated the effect of an active MBS and a sham device on the cardiovascular and neurological responses of ten volunteers (mean age 26.33 years, 70% male). Electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiography (ECG) were recorded in the initial resting-state, intermediate state, and the final state at half-hour intervals using a portable sensing device. During the experiment, the participants were engaged in a cognitive workload. In the active MBS group, the power of high-alpha, high-beta, and low-beta bands in the EEG increased, and the power of low-alpha and theta waves decreased, relative to the sham group. RR Interval and QRS interval showed a significant association with MBS stimulation. Heart rate variability features showed no significant difference between the two groups. A wearable MBS modality may be feasible for use in biomedical research; the MBS can modulate the neurological and cardiovascular responses to cognitive workload.