Alacron proposes to develop an advanced lossless data compression engine for EEG, for use in telephone EEG transmission systems and digital EEG recording systems. While useful in rural and remote setting without ready access to expert electroencephalographers, and for home monitoring in selected patients with epilepsy and sleep disturbances, presently available EEG telephone transmission systems restrict the number of channels of EEG transmitted and degrade the fidelity of the transmitted signal. Furthermore, digital EEG recording and monitoring system generate large amounts of data, and hence impose significant archival data storage requirements. Alacron's EEG compression engine will achieve sufficient compression to allow error-free transmission of at least 20 channels of EEG in real time over standard telephone lines, and provide approximately a ten fold reduction in data storage requirements for digital EEG recording systems. In Phase I, the feasibility of the proposed compression technique will be proven. In Phase II, the proposed technique will be implemented using commercially available custom designed components.
The proposed EEG data compression engine would have substantial commercial applicability. It could potentially be incorporated into all new digital EEG equipment, and could serve as the basis for a substantially improved EEG telephone transmission system.
