Embrace: A wrist strap that can detect epilepsy

About 50 million people worldwide suffer from epilepsy, how to provide better services for these people? A start-up, named Empatica, thought of a solution. It has developed a wrist strap that detects seizures and sends alarms to his family. But others can wear it to record their activities and stress.

The name of this wearable device, which can measure biological signals and emotional relationships, is called embrace. The square tracker displays time, stress levels, and seizure activity, plus a wide, thin wrist strap with a variety of colors designed to balance fashion and health needs. Embrace is also equipped with rechargeable batteries that can last more than a week. Some small electrodes are arranged on the wrist strap to conduct a weak current through the skin, and then the sweat glands are stimulated and then combined with other means to detect epileptic seizures. What's more, ordinary wearable devices can do things like track movement and sleep, etc.

After detection of epilepsy, the wrist band will vibrate, if the user responds to the vibration, then it is a false alarm. And if the user does not respond, the wrist strap will be linked to the smart phone, to a group of people (such as doctors, their family members, etc.) to issue alarms. Of course, epileptic patients can also use the detected pressure level rise and advance through breathing exercises or meditation to prevent.

According to the MIT Media Lab professor and Empatica's chief scientist Rosalind Picard, Embrace's ideas go back 2008 years. One of her studies at the time involved using the wrist strap to track the stress levels of autistic children by measuring the electrical conduction of the skin. Once again, she found that a child's skin electrical conduction data suddenly increased sharply, initially thought that the wrist band sensor is broken. But later found that the original data mutation is because the child prepared epileptic seizures (muscle stiffness and convulsions), resulting in the skin electrical conduction level increased. Inspired by this, 1 years later, Picard co-founded Empatica, a company focused on wearable sensors.

There are also some devices that can record epilepsy, such as the smartwatch of Smart Monitor. But those are basically the accelerometer tracking action to detect seizures. By contrast, the embrace is a combination of accelerometers, gyroscopes, and the measurement of the electrical conductivity of the skin to detect epilepsy, a more accurate detection method.

This month Empatica began raising 100,000 of billions of dollars in Indiegogo for the platform. It took only 1 days to complete the fund-raising goals and then 50,000 dollars.

The company is planning to seek U.S. FDA approval for embrace, which is expected to be available next summer for $199. The product also includes an app that can identify seizures and elevated levels of stress.