New Personal Monitoring Devices for Epilepsy May Offer Alternatives to Inpatient Video EEG

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Uncontrolled epilepsy affects more than 1.2 million Americans, often requiring a series of trials and errors to identify effective drug combinations. Continuous, long-term EEG data could streamline this process by revealing the full picture of a patient's seizure activity, but this would require a costly and inconvenient hospital stay.

An array of personal monitoring devices - including three to be unveiled at the American Epilepsy Society's (AES) 69th Annual Meeting* - offer biometric recording technology that could allow patients to monitor clinical and subclinical seizure activity in the everyday home environment and get advance warning before a seizure strikes.

Researchers from the University of Utah and Epitel Inc., (abstract 2.158) describe an inexpensive, disposable and discreet seizure-monitoring device called the EEG PatchTM. According to the authors, the patch is waterproof and relies on two electrodes to record EEG data during all aspects of everyday life, including bathing, sports and sleep. The device can operate for seven days on a single charge, and data can be downloaded anytime for review in the standard European Data Format. An epileptologist must position the device on the scalp at a known seizure-prone area of the brain identified by a traditional wired EEG.

"Armed with seven-day, location-specific EEG data, an epileptologist will have a robust record of quantitative seizure counts to better treat patients, revolutionizing therapy," says author Mark Lehmkuhle, Ph.D., an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Utah.

In a second study, (abstract 3.088) a device capable of detecting and recording generalized tonic-clonic seizures (GTCS), known as the Brain Sentinel® GTC Seizure Detection and Warning System, is described by researchers from Brain Sentinel and the Medical University of South Carolina, Thomas Jefferson University, the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Emory University, the University of Pennsylvania, NYU Comprehensive Epilepsy Center, University of Minnesota and the Texas Health Research & Education Institute.

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