Grammatical Evolutionary Techniques for Prompt Migraine Prediction

Abstract

The migraine disease is a chronic headache presenting symptomatic crisis that causes high economic costs to the national health services, and impacts negatively on the quality of life of the patients. Even if some patients can feel unspecific symptoms before the onset of the migraine, these only happen randomly and cannot predict the crisis precisely. In our work, we have proved how migraine crisis can be predicted with high accuracy from the physiological variables of the patients, acquired by a non-intrusive Wireless Body Sensor Network. In this paper, we derive alternative models for migraine prediction using Grammatical Evolution techniques. We obtain prediction horizons around 20 minutes, which are sufficient to advance the drug intake and avoid the symptomatic crisis. The robustness of the models with respect to sensor failures has also been tackled to allow the practical implementation in the ambulatory monitoring platform. The achieved models are non linear mathematical expressions with low computing overhead during the run-time execution in the wearable devices.