A Wearable Chip to Predict Seizures

One of the toughest aspects of having epilepsy is not knowing when the next seizure will strike. A wearable warning system that detects pre-seizure brain activity and alerts people of its onset could alleviate some of that stress and make the disorder more manageable. To that end, IBM researchers say they have developed a portable chip that can do the job; they described their invention today in the Lancet's open access journal eBioMedicine. The scientists built the system on a mountain of brainwave data collected from epilepsy patients. The dataset, reported by a separate group in 2013, included over 16 years of continuous electroencephalography (EEG) recordings of brain activity, and thousands of seizures, from patients who had had electrodes surgically implanted in their brains.