JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurobehavioral disease that makes children who suffer from it display behaviors of inattention, hyperactivity or impulsivity, thus affecting their ability to learn and establish proper family and social relationships. Various tools are currently used by child and adolescent psychiatric clinics to diagnose, evaluate, and collect information and data. The tools allow professional physicians to assess if patients need further treatment, following a thorough and careful clinical diagnosis process.

Objective:

To figure out potential indicators extracted from the tools (mobile EEG: NeuroSky Mindset and actigraph: CamNtech MotionWatch) and to validate them for diagnosis of ADHD. There are three indicators, two of them are from Mindset: Attention and Meditation; the other is from MotionWatch: Activity.

Methods:

Total of 63 participants are recruited, 40 males and 9 females in the case group; while 5 males and 9 females in the control group, they are age matched. The test was divided into three stages: pre_test, in_test, and post_test, with a testing interval of 20 minutes each. We use correlation analysis, repeated measures ANOVA, and regression analysis to investigate which indicators can be used for ADHD diagnosis.

Results:

About the Mindset, the analysis results show a significant correlation in attention with both Hit RT ISI Change (-.368, p<0.01) and Hit SE ISI Change (-.336, p<0.01). The higher the attention of the participants, the smaller both the hit RT change and the hit SE ISI change. For the MotionWatch, it is significant with CI (.352, p<0.01), Omissions (.322, p<0.05), Hit RT Std. Error (.393, p<0.01), and Variability (.351, p<0.01). This indicates that the higher the activity amounts, the higher the impulsive behavior of the participants is, and the more Target omissions in CPT test. The result shows that ADHD could be screened out when they were stimulated in 20 minutes with CPT test, because they present a more insignificant activity amounts than they were not stimulated (p<0.001). MotionWatch outperforms Mindset to screen ADHD.

Conclusions:

When the participants are stimulated under restricted conditions, the participants with ADHD will present different amount of activity over the unrestricted condition due to participants’ inability to exercise control over their own concentration. This finding could be a new electronic physiological biomarker of ADHD. It can be used to detect the amount of activity and help physicians diagnose the disorder in order to develop more objective, rapid auxiliary diagnostic tools. Clinical Trial: This research was supported by Chang Gung Memorial Hospital (CMRPG 3F1581 and CORPG 3F0751) and approved by Institutional Review Board (IRB), Chang Gung Memorial Hospital (No. 104-5397B) on October 01, 2015.