Temporal Divergence of True and False Alarms in Pediatric Nocturnal Seizure Monitoring
Mohammad Shahbakhti, Anemoon T. Bosch, Job van der Palen, Franciscus S. Leijten, Johannes P. van Dijk, Richard H. C. Lazeron, Roland D. ThijsABSTRACT
Seizure detection devices can improve the safety of children with epilepsy, yet high false alarms limit their clinical applicability. Here, we investigated whether specific time periods are disproportionately prone to false alarms. We analyzed 2876 NightWatch alarms occurring between 19:00 and 09:00 in 65 children (ages 3–16, 48% female). Temporal distributions differed significantly between true and false alarms ( p < 0.001), with a significant divergence in skewness ( p = 0.001); notably, 30% of false alarms occurred between 06:00 and 09:00. This suggests NightWatch performance is adversely affected by wakefulness and morning arousal. Our findings support exploring time‐ or state‐dependent detection thresholds to reduce false alarms.
Trial Registration: The PROMISE (NCT03909984) and LICSENSE (NTR4115/NR395) trials were registered at the Dutch Trial Registry.