Epilepsy is a common neurologic disorder, affecting about 2% of the population. Due to its high prevalence, and the physical and social consequences it brings to those affected by it, looking for better ways to treat the disease is necessary.
And that´s exactly what Daniel Callegari, Endrigo Conte, Tiagro Ferreto, Denis Fernandes and Filipe Moraes from PUCRS in Porto Alegre, Brazil, together with Fernando Burmeister from Dell Computers, and Dr. Romulo Severino from Sao Lucas Hospital in Porto Alegre, are doing. Their aim is to develop a platform to assist epilepsy diagnosis based on mobile cloud computing, which enables the monitoring of a patient outside of the hospital. They presented their research at the MOBIHEALTH 2014, the 4th international conference on Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare.
Today, epilepsy is diagnosed and controlled by electroencephalogram exams (EEG). It requires manual analysis of a large amount of data, as well as prolonged hospital stays. Existing portable EEG systems require a neurophysiology expert to analyse hours of data, and are not able to transmit information to the hospital when accute crisis occures.
Aware that remote care and monitoring of patients is a globally expected trend, the research team are working on EpiCare, a smartphone- and cloud-based platform for long-term remote epileptic patient monitoring. They use specialized algorithms for automatic detection of epileptic spikes, which play a fundamental role in the diagnosis of epilepsy.
Read more about the research here.
