Johns Hopkins Developing Seizure-Tracking EpiWatch App

Samantha Murphy Kelly, Mashable:

[Johns] Hopkins University wants to develop an app that can be used to detect future seizures. For now, it has created one to help collect data that occurs before, after and during a seizure, by using the sensors in the Apple Watch. For now, it has created one to help collect data that occurs before, after and during a seizure, by using the sensors in the Apple Watch.

I spent my entire childhood with a best friend who suffered from multiple seizures per day. We had to play inside, because outdoor activity in the Florida heat was a common trigger — he called it “overheating.” But really, any excitement could bring a seizure on, and if there was nobody there to catch him, he’d fall. Luckily, we were usually there. Now, so many years later, the nature of his condition is much more understood, and his seizures — through proper medication and routine — are controlled to the point where they aren’t generally comprised of violent tremors but merely of brief, detached episodes of drifting stillness. Of course, it took a long time to figure out how to treat the causes and the events themselves. There were lots and lots of meds, bumped heads, scraped knees, and bloody elbows.

With developments like the above, however, this progress could be accelerated with real-time analytics of the events surrounding such seizures. Called EpiWatch, the Johns Hopkins software is focused on epilepsy, but the underlying technology may not be limited to that affliction and could be built upon to track any manner of seizure known to modern medicine.

Still, there’s a bit of a way to go, as Apple Watch has some limitations here:

Although it may not be easy for a patient to notify the watch in real-time when they are having a seizure — a caregiver can activate the watch or if someone gets warning signs, they can alert the wearable ahead of time, too…

Because of battery considerations and a summary lack of substantive “always on” tracking, the current solution is for a user (or assisting nurse) to manually launch EpiWatch during a seizure event. That’s not particularly practical, for several obvious reasons. Still, by Apple Watch 2 or 3, this hurdle might be cleared, as physical toggling may no longer be a requirement.

At any rate, I’ve said it a million times, and it seems to bear repeating almost weekly: Apple’s most fundamental intent for Apple Watch is that it becomes a true deep health monitoring device. That’s the best way to make it a blockbuster hit and a real, bonafide game-changer.

And it’s the best way to make Apple a trillion-dollar company.