Profile Indicator for Autistic Children Using EEG Biosignal Potential of Sensory Tasks

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a measure of voltages caused due to neural activities within the brain. EEG is a recommended tool for diagnosing neurological problems because it is non-invasive and can be recorded over a longer time-period. The children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have difficulty in expressing their emotions due to their inability of proper information processing in brain. Therefore, this research aims to build a sensory profile with the help of EEG biosignal potential to distinguish among different sensory responses. The EEG signals acquired in this research identify different emotional states such as positive-thinking or super-learning and light-relaxation and are within the frequency range of 8-12 Hertz. 64 children participated in this research among which 34 were children with ASD and 30 were normal children. The EEG data was recoded while all the children were provided with vestibular, visual, sound, taste and vestibular sensory stimulations. The raw EEG data was filtered with the help of independent component analysis (ICA) using wavelet transform and EEGLAB software. Later, for building the sensory profile, entropy approximation, means and standard deviations were extracted from the filtered EEG signals. Along with that, the filtered EEG data was also fed to a neural networks (NN) algorithm which was implemented in MATLAB. Results from the acquired EEG signals depicted that during the sensory stimulation phase, the responses of all autistic children were in an unstable state. These findings will equip and aid their learning strategy in the future.