“My biggest fear is that if I am not there to help him, when I wake him up he will be dead from seizures.”
That mother’s fear has a sound basis. The risk for sudden death from epilepsy, or SUDEP, is as high as 1 in 100 in the sickest children with epilepsy, says Tobias Loddenkemper, MD, of the Epilepsy Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. Many of those seizures occur in sleep.
Loddenkemper has been testing a novel wristband that uses motion and sweat sensors to detect the onset of a seizure – upon which the device would sound an alert. So far, the device has performed well on tests at Boston Children’s, picking up more than 90 percent of generalized tonic-clonic (grand mal) seizures, says Loddenkemper. But more work is needed to reduce false alarms (often generated when children are playing video games) and enable to device to spot more subtle seizures that are less convulsive in nature.
“This work is triggered by some very personal experiences of parents calling my office telling me their child died in sleep from seizures,” says Loddenkemper. “I dread these calls. We want to prevent those calls.”
The device manufacturer has created a fundraising site to help further the wristband’s development.
