Spo2 Monitoring Provides a New Direction for Seizure Tracking

In the era of digitally driven medical health, wearable devices have attracted more and more attention as a direct and effective bridge. At present, professional-level medical hardware all focuses on the two major areas of elderly health and chronic disease management. On this basis, Viatom has expanded into a new field-neurological disease monitoring and early warning. For doctors, using an FDA wearable medical device that can continuously monitor and warn in real time will effectively improve treatment compliance and predict adverse events, helping the development of neurology.

What Is Epilepsy?

Epilepsy is a central nervous system (neurological) disorder in which brain activity becomes abnormal, causing seizures or periods of unusual behavior, sensations and sometimes loss of awareness.The clinical manifestations are paroxysmal, transient, repetitive and stereotyped. According to the survey1, there are about 50 million epilepsy patients in the world, and it is estimated that 5 million epilepsy patients will be diagnosed every year.^[1]

Manifestations and complications of epilepsy

Epilepsy patients may experience sleep problems such as insomnia, excessive daytime sleepiness, sleep apnea syndrome (OSA), restless legs syndrome (LS), and parasomnias. This is because the sleep parameters, sleep structure and normal biological rhythms of epileptic patients are more likely to be affected by epileptic discharges (Epileptic discharges, Eds). Both waking and sleeping EDs can change the sleep parameters and structure of epileptic patients, causing patients to produce sleep related diseases.

Epilepsy can easily lead to daytime sleepiness, fatigue, and abnormal behavior in patients. At the same time, changes in sleep structure will also affect the frequency of epileptic seizures, forming a vicious circle. A study 2 retrospectively analyzed the PSG results of 63 children with epilepsy and found that 78% of the patients had OSA, and the risk of OSA increased with age and the dose of AEDs. ^[²^] Epilepsy is a risk factor for OSA, and OSA may cause or exacerbate intractable epilepsy.

New Difficulties Bring New Models of Epilepsy Monitoring

The seizures of epilepsy are irregular and therefore, most patients with epilepsy live in fear and anxiety about the next seizure, which may strike like lightning at any point. If the patient is not detected and treated in time during the seizure, it is likely to cause sudden epileptic death.

After seizures, many epilepsy patients usually need to be hospitalized for routine video EEG monitoring, so that doctors can capture specific seizure types, make a clear diagnosis and rationally use drugs. But with the emergence of COVID-19, medical resources have become more strained, access to hospitals has become difficult, and epilepsy treatment has come to a standstill. A large number of epilepsy patients urgently need a new diagnosis and treatment process, which can complete monitoring and early warning at home without admission to hospital or ICU.

Long-term monitoring and early warning in the home environment provide patients with a buffer space, and epilepsy patients can monitor their physical conditions more conveniently in their daily lives. Doctors can remotely complete the work that originally needs to be done in the hospital through the computing model, which not only saves the cost of medical treatment for patients, but also expands the scale of treatment that the hospital can treat.

New home epilepsy monitoring device may replace video EEG in hospitals

Seizures cause peripheral autonomic changes manifested primarily as sympathetic excitation, including increased heart rate, changes in oxygen saturation, sweating (measured by electrodermal activity), and changes in blood pressure. Changes in these physiological indicators are very useful for monitoring and predicting seizures.

In most countries of the world, the number of specialized epilepsy physicians is still relatively small. Although they can identify many cues and features on the EEG, the large-scale identification of major seizure features done by specialized blood oxygen monitoring models is necessary for us to help millions of people with epilepsy in parts of the world and around the world.

Multiple clinical trials have demonstrated that sensors based on displaying physiological measurement data can be easily incorporated in wearable technology, allowing for improved seizure detection.^[³^] In order to evaluate the accuracy of predicting epileptic activity based on heart rate changes and arterial blood oxygen saturation, the University of Texas Epilepsy Research Group admitted 20 patients and collected data from 24 seizures within 355 hours. Studies have shown that the results of monitoring epilepsy through heart rate and blood oxygen saturation are consistent with video electroencephalography (VEEG), and can provide timely warnings and provide seizure records for doctors.

O2ring is a wearable medical device for the management of neurological disorders and chronic diseases, equipped with a proprietary PPG (photoplethysmography) sensor for dynamic sleep state assessment by monitoring respiratory rate and SpO2. After clinical verification, the sensitivity of predicting epileptic seizures exceeds 99.1%, and the false detection rate is extremely low, which is comparable to the detection results of 11 epilepsy centers in the United States.

The Latest in Wearable Electronic Devices for Seizure Tracking

O2ring is FDA-approved and CE-marked. Patients only need to wear it on their fingers to complete the monitoring. Our oximeter is waterproof and can be used during sleep and bathing which can be used for more than 16 hours on a single charge. O2ring can be wirelessly paired with smartphones, supports the sharing of historical reports and real-time data, and helps doctors and users manage their conditions more efficiently and comprehensively.

Sleep monitoring through O2ring will also effectively solve the underreporting of epileptic seizures. When the blood oxygen value drops abnormally, the nursing staff will be reminded immediately to ensure that epileptic patients are protected and helped in emergencies.

At the same time, O2ring can also assist patients in treatment, relieve sleep disorders, reduce the burden on patients and their families, and delay the depression and anxiety of some patients due to sleep problems. Innovative and effective epileptic seizure monitoring methods will strongly promote the treatment effect and become an important way for individualized epilepsy treatment and clinical research.

Case Study

Novela Neurotech is a digital health company that creates personalized care for chronic neurological conditions which is leading the transformation of remote neurological healthcare.

After investigation and investigation of several medical equipment suppliers, Viatom broke out with a rich and fully certified product line. As a leading brand in China’s wearable medical field, Viatom has always insisted on reaching users with hardware products as the core, and built user data management and cloud services based on products, providing users with comprehensive health solutions in multiple scenarios such as homes and hospitals.

In 2021, Neureka offically entered into a partnership with Viatom to begin helping the growing number of potentially undiagnosed epilepsy patients.

After O2ring captures an abnormality, it will quickly trigger the alarm system, and patients and nursing staff will be reminded in time to get help quickly. At the same time, each attack will be recorded to achieve effective management of epilepsy disorders.

In addition, the collected physiological data is also analyzed by the deep learning neural network method of artificial intelligence. Once a conclusion is reached, experts review the collected information and the conclusions of the artificial intelligence algorithm and compile it into an annotated report that can be sent to the patient’s medical team to aid in a more definitive epilepsy diagnosis.

At present, Viatom has provided substantial support for a number of international sleep and epilepsy projects and experimental experiments. The high sensitivity of pulse oximeters such as O2ring and CheckmeO2 Max make the early warning of diseases faster and more accurate, ensuring that users can get help in time.

Viatom’s R&D manager Wang said: “We have been working on the development of medical-grade wearable devices for many years, and now it is very meaningful to see that our reliable, convenient and fast monitoring devices can save lives in many situations.”

In the future, Viatom will continue to develop wearable medical devices based on biomarkers such as ECG, SpO2, blood pressure, and heart rate, and conduct fusion analysis algorithm model training on the collected data, so as to realize detection, alarm and quantitative evaluation of more diseases. Provide basis for clinical precision diagnosis and treatment, improve treatment effect.

Reference:

[1]Epilepsy. Available at: https://who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/epilepsy