NEW INVESTIGATOR AWARD 2023 WINNER

Elie Bou Assi, B.Eng. M.Eng. Ph.D.

IVADO Assistant Professor, Department of Neuroscience, Faculty of Medicine, University of Montreal
Principal Scientist, University of Montreal Hospital Research Center

Grant Project: Wearable-based monitoring of people with epilepsy in a residential setting

Project Summary: The most disabling aspect of living with epilepsy is the unpredictable nature of seizures, which creates a constant source of worriment and danger for patients and their caretakers. Traditional seizure detection and prediction methods based on the brain's electrical activity are not practical for long-term continuous monitoring. Recently, with the emergence of miniaturized and affordable wearables, such as wrist-worn devices or smart shirts, a new era has emerged for the monitoring of people with epilepsy (PWE). While recent studies have explored the possibility of detecting and forecasting seizures using wearables, translation into clinical practice is still limited, namely due to a lack of adequate testing in a residential environment. To this end, in a residential setting for a continuous period of 6 months, this project will evaluate the performance and usability of 1) wearables commercially available to Canadian PWE, including the Embrace 2 wrist-worn device and the Emfit bed sensor and 2) a seizure-day forecasting algorithm, recently developed by our team, based on sleep parameters extracted from a connected shirt. We expect to provide clinical practice guidelines regarding the use of wearables for the detection of generalized and focal to bilateral tonic-clonic seizures.

 Grant: $75,000