When a doctor or nurse checks your “vital signs,” she typically takes a blood pressure reading and measures your heart rate. Soon you may may be able to add “brain wave check” to that very short list of key, but easily performed, health tests.

A team of researchers from Burnaby, British Columbia, have just discovered a means to translate complex brainwaves into objective, practical and deployable brain vital signs, using longstanding brainwave technologies that have existed for nearly a century. They discuss their findings in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.

"The brain vital-sign framework described in the article represents the first step towards an easy way to monitor brain health," says Ryan D'Arcy, SFU's BC Leadership Chair in Medical Technologies. "Potential applications are in concussion, brain injury, stroke, dementia and other devastating brain diseases and disorders."

Vital sign measures are often used in clinics, hospitals and other care centers to assess the performance of various body systems.

Scientists in D'Arcy's NeuroTech Lab, based in Surrey Memorial Hospital, have now developed a simple way to measure brain health over time by using non-invasive electrodes to track the brain's electrical activity for key brain functions - in other words, the brain's vital signs.

The team, who partnered with the Mayo Clinic, Sheba Medical Center in Israel and high-tech company HealthTech Connex Inc., found that it is possible to monitor brain performance during auditory sensation, basic attention and cognitive processing.

"We know brainwaves provide an objective physiological measurement of brain functions," says D'Arcy. "We've been working for the last 20 years to solve the major gap in terms of utilizing this for a rapid and accessible vital sign for brain function."

Traditionally, brain function has been assessed only after trauma or disease has occurred and has relied heavily on subjective, behavior-based assessments.

"However, tracking our brain's vital signs is critically important for establishing a baseline for a person's objective brain activity," he adds, noting that in the event of injury or disease, it then becomes possible to evaluate if brain function changes, and whether treatments are effective.

"We describe the world's first physiology-driven brain vital-sign measure allowing us to quantify brain vitality over time," says Sujoy Ghosh Hajra, A Ph.D student working with D'Arcy and the paper's lead author.

In the paper, the researchers describe how their framework translates complex brainwave science into clinically accessible information and demonstrates successful measurement of brain vital signs in both younger and older adults. Their method identified age-related brain function changes that were not evident using traditional measures.