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Early detection is a large bargain when it comes to avoiding various dangers, but information technology takes on a whole new dimension of personal urgency when epilepsy is involved. There's a status associated with epilepsy called SUDEP (sudden unexpected expiry in epilepsy), where a person who has had a grand mal seizure within the past twelvemonth is much more likely to die suddenly later a seizure ends. Something like i in chiliad people with epilepsy die each year from SUDEP. Rosalind Picard of MIT has been working steadily on this problem for a while now, and she'due south budgeted it from a novel management: a wearable bio-monitoring device called the Embrace that can detect seizures before they happen.

Embrace dev timeline

Image credit: Empatica

The project began in 2007 under different auspices, every bit something closer to an emotional Fitbit for kids on the autism spectrum, whose outward behavior can look very unlike than their internal land. It originally recorded electrodermal activeness (EDA) by measuring skin conductance, because skin conductance is a useful way to query what your sympathetic nervous arrangement — in other words, your fight-or-flight wiring — is doing. Increasing EDA without accompanying concrete motion is associated with a rapid rise in emotional stress. Picard'southward student Ming-Zher Poh designed the device to be worn on a child'south wrist, from where information technology could alert parents or teachers when the child started winding up to a meltdown, and fifty-fifty built the sensor packet 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 information afterwards, Picard noticed "a whopper of a response on one side and zip on the other. It was such a big response, I didn't believe it was real." Only the student had kept a careful diary, and on the verbal date and time of the "whopper" response, his petty brother had had a seizure. As it turns out, soon before someone has a seizure, the hair on 1 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, only medical-quality" product: the Embrace.

Embrace features

Epitome credit: Empatica

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

Patients frequently look at the duration of a seizure as a measure out of how severe it was. But Picard's grouping found that the length of a seizure has little to do with how neurologically confusing it is, or for how long the disruption persists. What they did find was that the greater a patient's EDA during a seizure, the worse the disruption of their brain waves. The Encompass can keep constant vigil looking for the signs of a severe seizure, and if it detects the right combination of signals from the wearer, it can vibrate to alarm them. If the alert goes off merely the wearer doesn't reply quickly, like what might happen if they've fallen unconscious after a grand mal seizure, the device can ship an alert to a designated person who can and then come to the wearer's aid. Like the FAST response to a suspected stroke, the idea hither 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 too using a hopped-upward scientific version of the wristband with a wider assortment of sensors, called the E4, to written report epilepsy and other neurological atmospheric condition like anxiety, depression and PTSD. But Picard says she's yet "laser-focused" on getting the device in the hands of the general public. It offers the possibility of a time-stamped, bio-informatics data stream, and a body of data from a great many users could exist nerveless hither to aid inquiry and treatment of epilepsy and other disorders.

The beta version of the Embrace shipped to its Indiegogo backers final Friday; a pre-club page is live now on the site. Hopefully, the final version will deliver on its promises. The sooner we get tools like this in the wild, the better.