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Early detection is a big bargain when it comes to avoiding various dangers, but it takes on a whole new dimension of personal urgency when epilepsy is involved. There'southward a condition associated with epilepsy called SUDEP (sudden unexpected decease in epilepsy), where a person who has had a grand mal seizure within the past year is much more likely to dice suddenly after a seizure ends. Something like 1 in 1000 people with epilepsy dice each year from SUDEP. Rosalind Picard of MIT has been working steadily on this problem for a while now, and she's approaching information technology from a novel direction: a article of clothing bio-monitoring device called the Embrace that can detect seizures before they happen.

Embrace dev timeline

Prototype credit: Empatica

The project began in 2007 under different auspices, as something closer to an emotional Fitbit for kids on the autism spectrum, whose outward behavior can look very different than their internal country. It originally recorded electrodermal activity (EDA) past measuring pare conductance, because skin conductance is a useful style to query what your sympathetic nervous system — in other words, your fight-or-flight wiring — is doing. Increasing EDA without accompanying concrete move is associated with a rapid rising in emotional stress. Picard'southward student Ming-Zher Poh designed the device to be worn on a child's wrist, from where it could alarm parents or teachers when the child started winding upwards to a meltdown, and even congenital the sensor package into soft sweatbands (like the Domo wristband at correct) for maximum comfort and minimum intrusiveness.

While Picard and team were using the EDA-measuring wristband to study autism and its relationship with stress, a student borrowed a pair of prototypes — then-called Q Sensors — to monitor the stress levels of his autistic younger brother. Looking through the data later on, Picard noticed "a whopper of a response on one side and nothing on the other. It was such a big response, I didn't believe it was real." Just the student had kept a careful diary, and on the exact date and time of the "whopper" response, his little brother had had a seizure. As it turns out, shortly before someone has a seizure, the hair on i arm may stand on end. Upon this discovery, Picard immediately started working with epileptic kids and adults to troubleshoot and refine the wristband sensor into a "consumer-looking, but medical-quality" product: the Embrace.

Embrace features

Image credit: Empatica

What sets the Embrace apart is that information technology doesn't rely on EEG helmets or electrodes to monitor for the neurological activeness associated with a seizure. During a seizure, certain regions in the deep brain experience heightened activeness while activity in the cortex, which is near the scalp, is securely depressed. This miracle is common to near or all SUDEP cases. When the sensors pick up a change in EDA, it'southward picking upward autonomic nervous activity: nerve impulses originating "so far under the scalp that a traditional EEG cannot option them up," Picard says. Increasing EDA plus increasing physical motion tin signal the onset of a severe, potentially life-threatening seizure, and that's exactly what the Embrace is designed to observe.

Patients frequently look at the duration of a seizure as a measure of how astringent it was. But Picard'due south grouping constitute that the length of a seizure has picayune to do with how neurologically disruptive it is, or for how long the disruption persists. What they did notice was that the greater a patient's EDA during a seizure, the worse the disruption of their brain waves. The Encompass can proceed constant vigil looking for the signs of a severe seizure, and if it detects the correct combination of signals from the wearer, it can vibrate to alert them. If the alarm goes off simply the wearer doesn't respond quickly, like what might happen if they've fallen unconscious subsequently a m mal seizure, the device can send an alarm to a designated person who can and then come to the wearer's help. Like the FAST response to a suspected stroke, the idea here is that timely response is critical, and getting another human in the room with someone after they've had a seizure is important to making sure SUDEP doesn't strike once again.

Researchers are also using a hopped-upwards scientific version of the wristband with a wider array of sensors, chosen the E4, to study epilepsy and other neurological conditions like anxiety, depression and PTSD. Merely Picard says she's still "laser-focused" on getting the device in the hands of the general public. It offers the possibility of a fourth dimension-stamped, bio-informatics data stream, and a trunk of data from a groovy many users could be collected here to assistance inquiry and treatment of epilepsy and other disorders.

The beta version of the Embrace shipped to its Indiegogo backers last Fri; a pre-gild folio is live now on the site. Hopefully, the concluding version will deliver on its promises. The sooner nosotros get tools like this in the wild, the better.