A new device in the form of a shirt and a cap, called Wemu, can monitor wearers with epilepsy.
Wearable technology has taken another step in assisting medical professionals to make better diagnoses, as the Wemu t-shirt and cap help to monitor a very serious brain disorder – epilepsy – which currently impacts an estimated 50 million people worldwide.
Diagnosis of this condition isn’t easy, as it is not simply a matter of guessing that this was the cause of a seizure.
In order to diagnose epilepsy, at the moment, a seizure must be recorded while the patient is connected to an EEG (electroencephalography) machine. There is a wide variance in the symptoms of epilepsy, and there are a number of different types of epileptic disorder, “that react differently to various medical treatments,” according to neurologist Dr. Vincent Navarro, from the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital that is located in Paris. Now, the Wemu wearable technology is hoping to be able to help to make it easier for those diagnoses to be made.
This wearable technology can make it far easier to be able to record a seizure while it happens.
With a standard EEG, this can be extremely challenging, as seizures can occur quite irregularly. This makes it quite rare to be able to actually record the event during the 20 minute to one hour span of the standard test. That said, it is absolutely vital that a correct diagnosis be made, as non-epileptic seizures occur quite frequently and are often misdiagnosed as being a part of the disorder when they are actually psychiatric, cardiac, or caused by something else altogether.
According to the Pierre Fournier, the chief executive of the company behind the Wemu system, Bioserenity, “Instead of using desktop computers that force patients to remain in bed, we can use smartphones and use a wireless connection.” Through this system, the patient doesn’t need to be hooked up to a machine through a number of different wires that are attached to the body with adhesives. Instead, he or she simply wears a t-shirt and can also choose to wear an optional cap.
The biometric sensors in this wearable technology transfer the necessary data to a mobile app, and this can be accomplished from the comfort of their own home.
