- Sleek, smart, and potentially life-saving (Image: Embrace)
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Embrace was developed by a team led by Rosalind Picard at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, through a spin-off company called Empatica. It measures the skin's electrical activity as a proxy for changes deep in the brain, and uses a model built on years of clinical data to tell which changes portend a seizure.
It also gathers the usual temperature and motion data that smartwatches collect, allowing the wearer to measure physical activity and sleep quality. Empatica launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo on Tuesday and has already raised more than $120,000. Backers who pledge $169 will receive an Embrace watch.
The idea for the wristband came when Picard and her colleagues were running a study on the emotional states of children with autism, measuring skin conductance at the wrist as part of the study. Picard noticed that one of the children had registered a spike in electrical activity that turned out to have happened 20 minutes before a seizure. "It shocked me when I realised these things were showing up on the wrist," says Picard.
Distress signal
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The whole point of Embrace is to prevent sudden unexplained death in epilepsy (SUDEP). Its causes are not fully understood, but Picard says they understand enough to know how to reduce the chances of dying after an epileptic seizure. "Death doesn't happen when people are attended to," she says. "It's not understood why it happens, but the data is converging on what we think right now. Breathing stops. Hyperactivation of the amygdala makes you cut off with fury. If someone stimulates the person, that alone can get you breathing again."
When Embrace detects an imminent seizure, it can send out a message to the wearer's predesignated friends or family. And from a device that looks like any other sleek smart watch. "I remember people wearing big epilepsy bracelets when I was a kid," Picard says. "Nobody wants to wear ugly stigmatising medical technology."
Katrien Jansen, a doctor at the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL)in Belgium, points out that any form of stress can cause similar signals to the ones Picard's watch is looking for. "The biggest problem in designing these devices is getting the right detection sensitivity and specificity. Missing seizures, as well as false alarms, are a problem," she says. But she thinks there is certainly a future for these devices.