Recent years of research have shown that the complex temporal structure of ongoing oscillations is scale-free and characterized by long-range temporal correlations. Detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) has proven particularly useful, revealing that genetic variation, normal development, or disease can lead to differences in the scale-free amplitude modulation of oscillations. Furthermore, amplitude dynamics is remarkably independent of the time-averaged oscillation power, indicating that the DFA provides unique insights into the functional organization of neuronal systems. To facilitate understanding and encourage wider use of scaling analysis of neuronal oscillations, we provide a pedagogical explanation of the DFA algorithm and its underlying theory. Practical advice on applying DFA to oscillations is supported by MATLAB scripts from the Neurophysiological Biomarker Toolbox (NBT) and links to the NBT tutorial website . Finally, we provide a brief overview of insights derived from the application of DFA to ongoing oscillations in health and disease, and discuss the putative relevance of criticality for understanding the mechanism underlying scale-free modulation of oscillations.

Physiological signals have shown to be reliable indicators of stress in laboratory studies, yet large-scale ambulatory validation is lacking. We present a large-scale cross-sectional study for ambulatory stress detection, consisting of 1002 subjects, containing subjects’ demographics, baseline psychological information, and five consecutive days of free-living physiological and contextual measurements, collected through wearable devices and smartphones. This dataset represents a healthy population, showing associations between wearable physiological signals and self-reported daily-life stress. Using a data-driven approach, we identified digital phenotypes characterized by self-reported poor health indicators and high depression, anxiety and stress scores that are associated with blunted physiological responses to stress. These results emphasize the need for large-scale collections of multi-sensor data, to build personalized stress models for precision medicine.

Abstract-Autism covers a large spectrum of disorders that affect the individual's way of interacting socially and is often revealed by the individual's lack of interest in gazing at human faces. Currently Autism is diagnosed in children no younger than 2 years old. This paper presents a new monitoring device, the WearCam, to help forming a diagnosis of this neurodevelopmental disorder at an earlier age than currently possible. The WearCam consists of a wireless camera located on the forefront of the child. The WearCam collects videos from the viewpoint of the child's head. Color detection, face detection and gaze detection are run on the data in order to locate the approximate gaze direction of the child and determine where her attention is drawn to (persons, objects, etc.). We report on early tests of the camera within normally developing children. Firstly the technical characteristics of the current prototype of the WearCam will be described. Afterwards the type of data collected with this device with young children will be shown.

The hereditary character of dyslexia suggests the presence of putative underlying neural anomalies already in preliterate age. Here, we investigated whether early neurophysiological correlates of future reading difficulties—a hallmark of dyslexia—could be identified in the resting-state EEG of preliterate children. The children in this study were recruited at birth and classified on the basis of parents' performance on reading tests to be at-risk of becoming poor readers (n = 48) or not (n = 14). Eyes-open rest EEG was measured at the age of 3 years, and the at-risk children were divided into fluent readers (n = 24) and non-fluent readers (n = 24) after reading assessment at their third grade of school. We found that fluent readers and non-fluent readers differed in normalized spectral amplitude. Non-fluent readers were characterized by lower amplitude in the delta-1 frequency band (0.5–2 Hz) and higher amplitude in the alpha-1 band (6–8 Hz) in multiple scalp regions compared to control and at-risk fluent readers. Interestingly, across groups these EEG biomarkers correlated with several behavioral test scores measured in the third grade. Specifically, the performance on reading fluency, phonological and orthographic tasks and rapid automatized naming task correlated positively with delta-1 and negatively with alpha-1. Together, our results suggest that combining family-risk status, neurophysiological testing and behavioral test scores in a longitudinal setting may help uncover physiological mechanisms implicated with neurodevelopmental disorders such as the predisposition to reading disabilities.

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This letter describes a novel approach to the assessment of spatial cognition in children. In particular, we present a wireless instrumented toy embedding magneto-inertial sensors for orientation tracking, specifically developed to assess the ability to insert objects into holes. To be used in naturalistic environments (e.g., day cares), we also describe an in-field calibration procedure based on a sequence of manual rotations, not relying on accurate motions or sophisticated equipment. The final accuracy of the proposed system, after the mentioned calibration procedure, is derived by direct comparison with a gold-standard motion tracking device. In particular, both systems are subjected to a sequence of ten single-axis rotations (approximately 90°, back and forth), about three different axes. The rms of the angular error between the two measurements (gold-standard versus proposed systems) was evaluated for each trial. In particular, the average rms error is under 2°. This study indicates that a technological approach to ecological assessment of spatial cognition in infants is indeed feasible. As a consequence, prevention through screening of large number of infants is at reach.

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