Project Goals

This project came out of concerns we have as parents about our Son’s Epilepsy, which left me wanting to develop a seizure detector/alarm to tell us if he is having a seizure – see Purpose of Project for a more personal background.

When I talk to people about this project I am often surprised by their assumption that I would want to patent the technology developed and make it a commercial venture. This is not my intention – I have written it for our personal use, but have published all of the information I have gained and source code written under a free licence in the hope that it will be useful to others.

The project goals are therefore:

• Detect Tonic-Clonic seizures.
• Raise an alarm to warn a carer that a seizure is occurring.
• Run on low-cost hardware where possible.
• Require minimal contact with the patient (no contact preferred)
• Does not require the patient to lie on any special equipment.
• The software will always be Open Source, so other people can make use of it and benefit from it if it suitable for them.

I developed a number of other prototype seizure detectors before settling on the Smart Watch version. I recently gave a presentation at work that described these prototypes which you can download from our repository here.

If you have any queries, please have a look at the Frequently Asked Questions page, or email graham@openseizuredetector.org.uk