Epilepsy affects about 50 million people around the world and is the most common serious brain disorder, according to the World Health Organization.

Diagnosis isn’t easy.

A seizure has to be recorded while a patient is hooked up to an electroencephalography (EEG) machine.

« Epileptic symptoms vary widely and… many different types of epileptic disorders exist that react differently to various medical treatments, » says Dr Vincent Navarro, a neurologist at the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris.

« Moreover, seizures happen at an irregular rate. It is therefore rare to record a seizure while doing a standard EEG recording of 20 minutes to one hour.

« Finally, non-epileptic events are in nearly 20% of cases wrongly considered to be linked with epilepsy when they could be of a completely different origin, for instance loss of consciousness that can be cardiac or psychiatric. »

The hospital is working with a start-up on something it hopes will make diagnosis easier and faster.

Instead of being hooked up to a machine via an array of cabling, patients wear a t-shirt and optional cap at home, and biometric sensors feed information to a smartphone app.

Source: www.bbc.com