Wireless Brain Wave Classification for Alzheimer's Patients via Efficient Neural Network Computation

Wireless recording and real time classification of brain waves are essential steps towards future wearable devices to assist Alzheimer’s patients in conveying their thoughts. This work is concerned with efficient computation of a dimension-reduced neural network (NN) model on Alzheimer’s patient data recorded by a wireless headset. Due to much fewer sensors in wireless recording than the number of electrodes in a traditional wired cap and shorter attention span of an Alzheimer’s patient than a normal person, the data is much more restrictive than is typical in neural robotics and mind-controlled games. To overcome this challenge, an alternating minimization (AM) method is developed for network training. AM minimizes a nonsmooth and nonconvex objective function one variable at a time while fixing the rest. The sub-problem for each variable is piecewise convex with a finite number of minima. The overall iterative AM method is descending and free of step size (learning parameter) in the standard gradient descent method. The proposed model, trained by the AM method, significantly outperforms the standard NN model trained by the stochastic gradient descent method in classifying four daily thoughts, reaching accuracies around 90% for Alzheimer’s patient. Curved decision boundaries of the proposed model with multiple hidden neurons are found analytically to establish the nonlinear nature of the classification.