A platform for cognitive monitoring of neurosurgical patients during hospitalization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new platform for continuous cognitive monitoring of neurosurgical patients, enabling more extensive data collection during hospitalization for research into human cognition.

Contribution

The paper presents a comprehensive system design and specifications for real-time cognitive monitoring, facilitating naturalistic and longitudinal studies in clinical settings.

Findings

System supports perception, memory, and sleep research.

Enables collection of more data per patient during hospitalization.

Opens new avenues for studying human cognition in naturalistic conditions.

Abstract

Intracranial recordings in epilepsy patients are increasingly utilized to gain insight into the electrophysiological mechanisms of human cognition. There are currently several practical limitations to conducting research with these patients, including patient and researcher availability and the cognitive abilities of patients, which limit the amount of task-related data that can be collected. Prior studies have synchronized clinical audio, video, and neural recordings to understand naturalistic behaviors, but these recordings are centered on the patient to understand their seizure semiology and thus do not capture and synchronize audiovisual stimuli from tasks. Here, we describe a platform for cognitive monitoring of neurosurgical patients during their hospitalization that benefits both patients and researchers alike. We provide the full specifications for this system and describe some example use cases in perception, memory, and sleep research. Our system opens up new avenues to collect more data per patient using real-world tasks, affording new possibilities to conduct longitudinal studies of the electrophysiological basis of human cognition under naturalistic conditions.