Monitoring and diagnosis of Alzheimer Disease using noninvasive compressive sensing EEG

The majority of elderly with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) receive care at home from caregivers. In contrast to standard tethered clinical settings, a wireless, real-time, body-area smartphone-based remote monitoring of electroencephalogram (EEG) can be extremely advantageous for home care of those patients. Such wearable tools pave the way to personalized medicine, for example giving the opportunity to control the progression of the disease and the effect of drugs. By applying Compressive Sensing (CS) techniques it is in principle possible to overcome the difficulty raised by smartphones spatial-temporal throughput rate bottleneck. Unfortunately, EEG and other physiological signals are often non-sparse. In this paper, it is instead shown that the EEG of AD patients becomes actually more compressible with the progression of the disease. EEG of Mild Cognitive Impaired (MCI) subjects is also showing clear tendency to enhanced compressibility. This feature favor the use of CS techniques and ultimately the use of telemonitoring with wearable sensors.