In the ongoing fight against epilepsy, the Epilepsy Foundation awarded a $3 million grant to a group of international researchers, scientists, and interoperability experts evaluating biosensors for improved seizure prediction. The team serves to recruit and collect data from epilepsy patients with implanted devices that measure brain activity, furthering their understanding of the changes in the body that allow or induce seizures.
Epilepsy is the underlying tendency of the brain to produce seizures, sudden and abnormal bursts of electrical energy within the brain that disrupt important functions. It is the most common serious brain disorder across the globe, with more than 65 million people around the world living with it. The team, with members from King’s College London, Mayo Clinic, and Seer Medical/The University of Melbourne, aims to find a way to reliably forecast seizures before they happen which currently is an unfortunate elusive task.
The Epilepsy Foundation’s senior director of innovation, Sonya Dumanis, Ph.D., explains, “Unpredictability, not knowing when or why a seizure starts, is a major challenge for those living with epilepsy. Leveraging the exciting research coming out of the seizure forecasting field, emerging wearable technologies and machine learning approaches, we believe we have a unique opportunity to create an individualized seizure gauge that will allow a person with epilepsy to monitor the likelihood of a seizure on a daily basis.”
Once the team’s biosensor testing concludes, they’ll select up to three peripheral sensors to focus on in their upcoming second year. These sensors will undergo seizure forecast testing while paired with existing EEG recording devices. The data acquired from this will be mined for clues about exactly what happens in the human body in the hours and minutes leading up to a seizure. This finalized data will then be distributed across crowd-sourcing platforms for algorithm development.
