Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a chronic, debilitating disorder usually diagnosed during childhood impacting negatively many aspects of patients’ lives including: academic achievements, social skills, perception of self-worth and leads to strained parent-child relationships.
The cost of illness has been estimated as being as high as €7,000 per patient per year in the UK (Telford C. et al. - 2012) and the prevalence of the condition in Europe is estimated at 5% of the child population. In other words, 4 million EU children are likely to be suffering from ADHD.
The most common treatment for ADHD is a form of psychoactive medication, and in many cases, methylphenidate (MPH). While these drugs do have a positive impact, leading to short term adaptation of the child’s behavior, they are purely symptomatic. They also have significant side effects, impacting sleep, appetite and sometimes the personality of the child through affective blunting and reduced creativity; consequently, they developed a cultural resistance from users (Berger I, Dor T, Nevo Y, Goldzweig G. -2008).
There is an alternative: personalized brain rehabilitation (PBR). It is a self-paced neuromodulation technique that uses the signals from the brain, collected in real-time using a safe, non-invasive technique called electroencephalography (EEG), to help the patient train brain functions and normalize its activity to a healthy range of functioning. It has been associated with improved outcomes in ADHD children in many controlled studies, which recent meta-analysis pooling those positive results into stronger level of evidence (Micoulaud-Franchi 2013). Some studies have demonstrated that the care delivered via neurofeedback had long-lasting effects: children treated for a few months with NFB remained free of the symptoms 6 months even after having ceased the treatment (Steiner et al.- 2014), a major departure from the symptom-only impact of drugs. Two main issues have hindered the deployment of neurofeedback as a large-scale treatment for ADHD: first of all, the large heterogeneity of technical and methodological implementations in existing trials; second, the lack of a standardized technical implementation for the delivery of neurofeedback.
Recent breakthroughs in EEG hardware and real-time software are finally enabling the development of a fully automated neurofeedback device that would be user-friendly and robust to be used in the home by the patients and their families themselves without a doctor or a therapist present. This is the device we set out to develop and demonstrate through the NEWROFEED project.
