Point-of-care neurophysiology: Assessing neural function in the acute stroke patient

Abstract

Assessing the neural function in acute stroke patients in a timely manner is important to identify time sensitive treatment. While a hospital may have clinical neurophysiology machines, these are complex to use and crucially expensive to own. A low-cost point-of-care system for assessing the neural function in such patients would have value in many clinical centers, and also potentially with EMS teams. A study to determine the effectiveness of such an approach, especially with a limited number of EEG channels, requires suitable devices to provide this functionality. This paper focuses on the design and performance considerations for such a system which will be used in this study. Of interest is the use of the devices the clinicians already have (e.g. smartphone, tablet) to access and control the system as well as real-time performance of sampling on low-cost commodity hardware and the provision of an extensible platform that can be upgraded and take advantage of cloud computing resources.