Automatic recognition of alertness level from EEG by using neural network and wavelet coefficients

Electrophysiological recordings are considered a reliable method of assessing a person's alertness. Sleep medicine is asked to offer objective methods to measure daytime alertness, tiredness and sleepiness. As EEG signals are non-stationary, the conventional method of frequency analysis is not highly successful in recognition of alertness level. This paper deals with a novel method of analysis of EEG signals using wavelet transform, and classification using ANN. EEG signals were decomposed into the frequency sub-bands using wavelet transform and a set of statistical features was extracted from the sub-bands to represent the distribution of wavelet coefficients. Then these statistical features were used as an input to an ANN with three discrete outputs: alert, drowsy and sleep. The error back-propagation neural network is selected as a classifier to discriminate the alertness level of a subject. EEG signals were obtained from 30 healthy subjects. The group consisted of 14 females and 16 males with ages ranging from 18 to 65 years and a mean age of 33.5 years, and a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 32.4±7.3 kg/m2. Alertness level and classification properties of ANN were tested using the data recorded in 12 healthy subjects, whereby the EEG recordings were not used to train the ANN. The statistics were used as a measure of potential applicability of the ANN. The accuracy of the ANN was 95±3% alert, 93±4% drowsy and 92±5% sleep.