I heard about this through the New Scientist Twitter feed: Embrace is a smartwatch which is designed to detect changes in electrical signals in the skin that occur before a seizure.
I think I mentioned in a previous post that Ih ave been thinking about getting something like this, but this is much more appealing (and cheaper) than some others I have looked at. It is a crowdsourcing venture and they have been doing offers for below market price ($199) watches for the first few donors. Unfortunately the best offers are sold out, but they are still giving a watch to the first 4000 people who donate $189 (£120) before Christmas (132 taken so far). I think I will do this and thought some of you might be interested, too.
Thank you for posting this AmyBadd! Researchers have been developing this kind of technology for a number of years, but the difficult thing is getting the sensitivity and specificity for seizures adequate enough (so that the device doesn't sound every five minutes with false alarms, but also doesn't miss seizures). Ideally you will have access to this performance data for Embrace before investing any money, and you also need to find out what kind(s) of seizure it detects best. This type of technology has come a long way, which is extremely positive, but please be cautious as there is no 'perfect' solution as yet.
They have published a number of papers in both medical and engineering journals and have already applied for a licence as a medical device to the EMA and plan to do the same with the FDA. I am a medical statistician, so I will go away and read some of these papers and see how I think their data and data analysis stands up before I invest any of my own money!
Thanks for the warning, though, you are right, there is no perfect solution, unfortunately.
Thank you very much AmyBadd! You are just the right person to investigate this; we are lucky to have you on our forum. All the best, ERUK_RI
Hi Amy, thank you for notification. As stated above, everyone has different types of seizures and watches like these are not available to every one world-wide. I am based in South Africa and obtaining a product like this is expensive when one has to pay via forex, so one copes without.
If you check out the link, they are offering fairly responable worldwide shipping, so it would be the same to get it in SA as un the UK. I realise that this adds to the overall cost, and this is still a lot of money, but like i said previously, this just seems more reasonable than a lot of the others I have seen and they all worked on motion alone. This works on both motion and the electric signals in the skin and also has other capabilities that allow you to monitor day-to-day activities, exercise, etc, so they can be used even without the epilepsy monitoring.
I know I may be getting a bit excited about this, and I am not endorsing it, I just wanted to bring it to people's attention.
You might be interested in the article below too, it should be free to access and has some more detail on the market. The price of these will come down quickly as there will be a lot of compettion, especially when more powerful smartwatches come on the market which can run apps of their own to do this.
Thanks, that article is certainly very understandable and contains a lot of the information about other competitors. I had a chat with my husband last night and I think we are going to go for one of these Embace watches. We can afford it and it certainly seems to have better prediction capabilities than the (more expensive) accelerometer-based items we looked at that are currently available. You're correct, in a couple of years, these sorts of things wil (hopefully) be widely and more cheaply available, but this way, I will get one some time next year (estimated delivery is July).
I'm quite interested in them too. I have plenty of seizures every night and its often difficult remember of how many I have had. As you will know that is very useful to know to identify if a drug you start taking is really helping or not so one could be a lot of help.
By the way if you or anyone is interested, a couple of pages back from that article there are a few other interesting articles on various aspects of epilepsy. Again they should be free to access.
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