  Developing a Brain-Computer Interface~(BCI) for seizure prediction can help
epileptic patients have a better quality of life. However, there are many
difficulties and challenges in developing such a system as a real-life support
for patients. Because of the nonstationary nature of EEG signals, normal and
seizure patterns vary across different patients. Thus, finding a group of
manually extracted features for the prediction task is not practical. Moreover,
when using implanted electrodes for brain recording massive amounts of data are
produced. This big data calls for the need for safe storage and high
computational resources for real-time processing. To address these challenges,
a cloud-based BCI system for the analysis of this big EEG data is presented.
First, a dimensionality-reduction technique is developed to increase
classification accuracy as well as to decrease the communication bandwidth and
computation time. Second, following a deep-learning approach, a stacked
autoencoder is trained in two steps for unsupervised feature extraction and
classification. Third, a cloud-computing solution is proposed for real-time
analysis of big EEG data. The results on a benchmark clinical dataset
illustrate the superiority of the proposed patient-specific BCI as an
alternative method and its expected usefulness in real-life support of epilepsy
patients.
