Mid Sweden University

An early Alzheimer Disease (AD) diagnosis is fundamental for maximizing the effectiveness of treatment administration. Unfortunately, distinguish AD from other neurodegenerative dementias, such as Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) is not trivial. Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) emerged as an effective non-invasive, easy to apply and not time-consuming solution. TMS-based techniques generally require expensive ad hoc clinical equipment that suffer from poor flexibility and user friendliness in defining the specific diagnostic protocol. In this work, a low-cost BeagleBone Black single board computer (BBB-SBC) has been used to implement all the functionalities required to manage a TMS-based instrument. Timeliness of signal generation is guaranteed by dedicated programmable real-time units hosted by the BBB-SBC System on Chip. Web-based interface, complemented by IoT-like features, provide a high degree of versatility and permit the execution of many different diagnostic protocols. In particular, the experimental validation confirms timing error in the sub-microsecond range, more than enough for the considered application. © 2020 IEEE.