On the development of rTMS system for reducing auditory hallucination symptom in schizophrenia: The study of low frequency rTMS effect in EEG on healthy subjects without sound stimulation

Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder. One percent of the population is suffer from schizophrenia. The patients cannot differentiate real situation from imaginary. Auditory hallucination is the most common symptom of schizophrenia. It causes hyper-Activity at auditory area of the brain. The schizophrenia mental disorder is chronic, but treatable. In this paper, we proposed the system with local low frequency rTMS and EEG recording, to help modulate and observe the auditory activity of the brain. This paper shows the preliminary study of the effect of low frequency rTMS in 11 healthy subjects without sound stimulation, observed from their EEG channel CP5 and CP6. The average power spectral density values of EEG data are calculated for 5 seconds before and 5 seconds after the sets of low frequency rTMS. By paired t-Test, the results show that average power of EEG data in alpha band (8-13 Hz) significantly decrease after sets of the stimulation in left temporal brain (p=0.03), while there is no significant change neither in the right temporal brain nor in the other bands of left temporal brain.