A start-up called empathetic has created a new bracelet for epileptics, which he hopes detect attacks and notify the family when given one, but it could also captivate people who want a stylish device to record activity and stress.
Empathic, which builds portable devices to measure the relationship between biological signals and emotions, launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise $ 100,000 in IndieGoGo in mid-November. The company achieved this goal in one day and has since gotten another $ 50,000.
It is expected next summer at a price of $ 199 (about 160 euros) that Embrace is available. It will include applications to detect attacks and to alert you when your stress levels have exceeded a certain threshold you set yourself. You can also do the same things that other tracking bracelets exercise, how to follow the movement and sleep.
It embraces the exterior design has more to do with fashion than with health. Unvídeo empathic presents him as a wide, thin bracelet wrapped around the arm. His square face is dominated by a ring that lights up to inform the time, the level of stress and activity related to the attacks. It has a rechargeable battery that supposedly lasts longer than a week.
Professor of Media Lab of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA) and scientific director of empathic, Rosalind Picard, says the idea behind Embrace emerged in 2008. At that time researching at MIT with a bracelet measuring stress levels in autistic children through measurements of the conductivity of your skin. This body tends to better conduct electricity when stress levels increase.
When Picard saw a huge spike in conductivity data of a child at first he thought the sensor bracelet was broken. But it turned out that the peak occurred just before the child suffered a tonic-clonic seizure, also known as grand mal, in which the muscles become stiff and convulsive movements occur. Picard explains that these attacks produce high levels of skin conductance.
A year later, the researcher founded a company called Affectiva, to sell bracelets to do track stress-related emotions and developed a software capable of analyzing the emotions of people leaving in videos. Affectiva then it focused exclusively on software, and Picard empathetic co-founded this year to focus on portable sensors.
There are already some devices on the market that recorded the attacks, comoSmartWatch, Smart Monitor, but tend to focus on the movement that can be recorded with an accelerometer. It embraces empathic states that can measure more accurately attacks by collecting data on the movement of the accelerometer and gyroscope apparatus and combined with measurements of the conductivity of the skin. This is collected by small electrodes on the inner face of the bracelet, passing a tiny current through your skin and measure how the sweat glands are stimulated (can be measured in the skin but do not feel you’re sweating).
If the algorithm detects an attack empathic, the bracelet will vibrate, allowing the user to indicate that it was a false alarm. If the user does not respond, the bracelet connect to your smartphone to notify a list of people, such as doctor and family. Picard says the company plans to seek approval of the device by the US Food and Drug.
The president of the Epilepsy Foundation of America, Warren Lammert, whose group has funded a clinical trial at the University of New York (USA) to investigate the effectiveness of Embrace, and other investigations for SmartWatch, says that using a device as Embrace to record the attacks could provide more information on how different drugs affect epileptics and produce reliable data for clinical trials of new drugs.
Professor of neurology and director of the Center for Epilepsy at the University of California in San Francisco (USA), Daniel Lowenstein says he worries sensitivity Embrace attacks and how capable or not to detect various types of attacks . But he notes that it could be especially valuable for those patients able to keep the attacks at bay if they know that their stress levels are growing. Receive notice bracelet would give them time to stop and do breathing exercises and meditation.
