An Epilepsy related project seeking funding right now on Indiegogo is The Wemu.
The WEMU aims to use smart-clothing with built-in biometric sensors to create a monitoring system that is easy and comfortable to wear, allowing people to be monitored over several days of their regular daily activity, rather than waiting for a specific monitoring appointment at a hospital.
The clothing would involve a shirt and hat that use biometric sensors to collect data through electric signals like heart activity, muscle contraction and brain activity. This data is fed to a smartphone app that allows the user to view the data.
The data would also be uploaded to a cloud system, allowing doctors to review it remotely and provide a diagnosis.
I can see this being of significant benefit at least in terms of convenience. People won’t have to wait for appointments and spend hours (or overnight) staying at a hospital for monitoring.
Because the WEMU will monitor the evolution of an individual’s seizures over time, using machine learning algorithms, the smart system will detect trends in epileptic behavior, thus allowing the device to sound an alarm in case of high risk of seizure. The WEMU will give patients, parents and love ones greater piece of mind, knowing that the risk of seizure is under constant surveillance.
So much more research is needed to understand Epilepsy that any device that makes it easier to gather data and enable further research and diagnosis is going to be of significant benefit.
The indiegogo campaign currently has $30k of it’s $200k goal raised with two weeks left, hopefully it is fully backed as the first milestone and then made available globally by hea
