Purpose of the Project

This project came about because several years ago our son Benjamin, who suffers from epilepsy had a large seizure and stopped breathing completely. We had to resuscitate him and had a blue lights trip to the hospital where he stayed for a few days to recover.

The thing that disturbed me most about this was that the only reason we went to check on him at that time was that one of us happened to look up at a video monitor that we have installed to keep an eye on him, and noticed his movements were a bit unusual. We don’t know what would have happened if one of us hadn’t noticed it on the video screen.

This left me thinking that really we don’t want to rely on looking at a screen to check he is ok – I should have the skills required to make a machine to tell us something looks unusual and warn us…so I started looking into ways of detecting his sort of epileptic seizures (tonic-clonic).

Benjamin is autistic, so I have been trying to make this work without requiring wires etc. to be attached to him, because he would just pull them off. Also, when we started, he refused to sleep in a bed, and instead sleept on the floor behind his bedroom door. This means that there were no currently available seizure detectors on the market that would be suitable for him.

We eventually managed to train him to wear a watch on a night (and asking for his watch is now how he tells us he is ready to go to bed), which is why the available versions of OpenSeizureDetector work with a PineTime or Garmin smart watch. I am pleased that because the PineTime only costs ~£35 that we can use that and a basic Android Phone to make a low cost seizure detector, that we have demonstrated works well with tonic-clonic seizures.

This is my personal motivation for the project – I have also added a more formal Project Goals description from a technical perspective.