Frequency-Domain EEG Analysis for Sudden Pain Perception

Pain is a sensory phenomenon when the body hurts and receptors are stimulated, which belongs to a subjective experience. Sudden pain tortures the patients' physical and mental health seriously. However, some patients with aphasia or other cognitive impairment cannot describe their own pain clearly, which exerts many drawbacks to their illness. Fortunately, studies have shown that pain can be detected objectively. Detection of changes in Electroencephalogram (EEG), to help make the judgment of pain, and later take appropriate treatment measures, is conducive to early treatment of disease and get rid of pain. In this paper, relative power spectral density (PSD), that marks the EEG signal change in frequency domain is proposed and tested on 29 people. The data were obtained including male and female subjects with a large sample of different ages. The results were optimized step by step in signal processing, constantly eliminating samples whose noise was too big or the preprocessing effect was not good. The accuracy of judging the presence of pain is up to 84.3%, and the accuracy of cross-verification is up to 91.4%. Experimental results show that brainwaves especially alpha wave can be used as a powerful objective tool for sudden pain detection.