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A shirt and cap that can diagnose epilepsy quickly and easily has been approved for use by European health services, including the UK鈥檚 NHS.
Epileptic seizures are the result of excessive electrical discharges in the brain. The World Health Organization estimates that over 50 million people worldwide have the condition, including 6 million in Europe, making it one of the world鈥檚 most common serious neurological conditions.
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Brain implants and apps have been developed to warn of oncoming seizures. But to diagnose the condition, someone must typically have a seizure recorded by an EEG machine in a hospital 鈥� with sensors and wires attached to the scalp.
鈥淎n EEG reading is at the heart of a reliable diagnosis,鈥� says Fran莽oise Thomas-Vialettes, president of French epilepsy society EFAPPE. But seizures rarely coincide with hospital appointments. 鈥淭he diagnosis can take several years and is often imprecise.鈥�
Seizures are so difficult to record that 30 per cent of people with epilepsy in Europe are misdiagnosed. In developing countries that lack medical equipment and healthcare the situation is even worse.
To make diagnosis easier, French start-up BioSerenity has developed a smart outfit called the Neuronaute that monitors people as they go about their day. The shirt and cap are embedded with biometric sensors that record the electrical activity of the wearer鈥檚 brain, heart and muscles. If a seizure occurs, the outfit can send an EEG recording of the brain to doctors via a smartphone.
Epilepsy trigger
The outfit also records the wearer鈥檚 movements using an accelerometer, gyroscope and compass. This provides information about what activities trigger someone鈥檚 seizures.
Wearing the outfit at home lets patients and doctors gather precise readings over long periods of time. The outfit has recently successfully completed a six-month trial at the Brain and Spine Institute at the Piti茅-Salp锚tri猫re Hospital in Paris.
On 16 May, BioSerenity announced that the outfit had received regulatory approval for use in hospitals in the UK and across Europe. This means that NHS hospitals will now be free to diagnose people using the Neuronaute if they wish. At least two hospitals in France 鈥� the Centre Hospitalier R茅gional Universitaire de Lille and the Hospices Civils in Lyon 鈥� are already set to try out the outfit in July and August.听鈥淭he device looks promising,鈥� says Louis Vall茅e, a听neuropaediatrician听at the Lille听hospital. 鈥淲e are听considering whether it would benefit our young patients.鈥�
Thomas-Vialettes thinks that the Neuronaute will be particularly good for children. With existing diagnosis, children must spend 24 or 48 hours hooked up to an EEG machine during which there may be no seizure, she says.
Hala Nasser, BioSerenity鈥檚 chief medical officer and a paediatrician specialising in child neurology at the Robert-Debr茅 paediatric hospital in Paris, says that the team had children in mind when designing the outfit.
Long-term recording outside of a hospital could lead to faster, more accurate and cheaper diagnoses, says BioSerenity CEO Pierre-Yves Frouin. He also hopes that applying machine learning techniques to anonymised data collected from many people with epilepsy will lead to new algorithms and biomarkers that will improve diagnoses even more. Clinical trials for these techniques are planned for 2017.
The smart outfit could also help in developing countries. 鈥淚n Africa, for example, there is a high rate of epilepsy and a lack of neurologists and equipment,鈥� says Frouin. 鈥淣ow we have a system that is cheap and easy to use by local nurses 鈥� and the results can be analysed remotely.鈥�
