Editor's Choice Main Category: Epilepsy Also Included In: Neurology / Neuroscience;Pediatrics / Children's Health Article Date: 02 May 2012 - 13:00 PDT

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The device could potentially collect clinically useful data from epilepsy patients during their daily routines instead of having to visit the hospital for observation. If the early results are confirmed, the device would even be able to alert patients to seek immediate medical attention when their seizures are severe enough.

Professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, Rosalind Picard, and her team originally designed the sensors to measure the emotional states of children with autism given that their outward behavior can be different to that what they actual feel. The sensor measures the skin's electrical conductance, which indicates the state of the sympathetic nervous system that controls the human fight-or-flight response.

The study, conducted at the Children's Hospital in Boston, revealed that the higher a patient's skin conductance is during a seizure, the longer it took for the patient's brain to resume neural oscillations, i.e. brain waves that are measured by EEGs.

According to at least one clinical study, there is a correlation between the duration of brain-wave suppression after seizures and the number of sudden unexplained deaths in epilepsy (SUDEP) that can occur hours after a seizure. In the U.S. alone, thousands of people die from SUDEP.

At present, epileptic patients may use various criteria, one of them being the duration of the seizure, to establish whether a seizure is severe enough to seek immediate medical attention.

However, Picard says:

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