

A brain implant offers relief to an epilepsy patient - spectruman
http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/life-as-a-bionic-woman#.VMkF_8IjkD8.hackernews

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whyleyc
This is great for partial seizures but not really applicable for anyone with
generalized epilepsy (where the origin of abnormal electrical activity in the
brain cannot be pinpointed).

Tech is moving along nicely for the latter type of epilepsy though - for
anyone interested, the state of the art is the "Embrace wristband" which uses
electrical activity across the skin to alert _before_ a seizure occurs. It can
pair with mobile devices to send SMS alerts to friends and family - very cool:

[http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26599-smartwatch-
detec...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26599-smartwatch-detects-
skins-electricity-to-predict-seizures.html#.VMktCoqQGnM)

~~~
compbio
See also this Kaggle competition where the task was to predict impending
seizures: [https://www.kaggle.com/c/seizure-
prediction](https://www.kaggle.com/c/seizure-prediction) The top contestants
achieved an accuracy of around 0.82 AUC, which blew the top of previous
efforts.
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/12/10/369654830/a-crowd...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/12/10/369654830/a-crowd-
of-scientists-finds-a-better-way-to-predict-epileptic-seizures)

This blogpost reviews the two Kaggle competitions and interviews the top
contestants on their methods: [http://blog.kaggle.com/2015/01/26/american-
epilepsy-society-...](http://blog.kaggle.com/2015/01/26/american-epilepsy-
society-seizure-prediction-challenge/)

Very rewarding projects to hack on.

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jwise0
Dumping data out of medical devices, of late, has become a topic that might be
of interest to this community. In general, the law requires that a patient be
able to access all the medical data that they generate; it's part of their
health record, and (with very few exceptions) they have a right to know the
contents of it.

Unfortunately, as patients begin automatically generating data -- for
instance, pacemakers that automatically dump ECG data to a doctor's office, or
implantable neurostimulators that automatically dump EEG data -- there have
been real concerns lately over whether they can access the data in a
standardized format (or, in reality, whether they can access it at all!).
Companies have been somewhat reticent to give patients access to what they
perceive as proprietary machine learning data that their device has collected.

Hugh Campos discusses this in a talk he gave at one point:
[http://boingboing.net/2012/09/28/why-cant-pacemaker-users-
re...](http://boingboing.net/2012/09/28/why-cant-pacemaker-users-rea.html)

It would be interesting to know if patients have access to implanted EEG data
(perhaps they could use it to measure sleep, if they could access it?). They
should, but I'm not holding out hope.

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pavel_lishin
I wonder what she has to be wary of, now. I assume that being near strong
magnetic fields and other things is probably... problematic. (No more MRIs for
her, I'd wager.)

I also wonder if it's big enough to set off airport security, or other metal
detectors.

~~~
fossuser
Maybe, though there's a precedent for deep brain stimulation implants to treat
tremors
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbX1t9dfgVE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbX1t9dfgVE))
and I believe they're still able to get MRIs.

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jkot
I got some idea for hardware hacker with some free time. Epilepsy might go
unnoticed for years. Friend of mine was diagnosed just because episode
happened during GP visit.

Some non-invasive monitoring device with some sort of recording could be very
helpful to many people.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I'm guessing your friend had petit-mal seizures, where you just sort of stop
and freeze for some amount of time that you're not aware of?

~~~
jkot
Yes. he/she does not have a shaking, but can not drive. It come with more
stuff and escalated, so seizures are the smallest problem :-(

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Brendinooo
Reminded me of Crichton's "The Terminal Man," though the details are clearly
different.

Neat to see this becoming a reality, without the bad stuff that the novel
added in.

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superobserver
Similar tech to tDCS which has a plethora of applications as well.

You will be assimilated! Resistance is futile!

~~~
aruggirello
Jean-Luc Pickard is our last hope...

