Brainwave – The Irish Epilepsy Association – Shedding a light on epilepsy

An interdisciplinary team of engineers, medical and social scientists in the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan has developed a responsive epilepsy control system which has been successful in detecting seizures in rats with epilepsy.

The Mind Brain Welfare Team recently won the Creative Applications Category of the 2010 Embedded Software Design Contest with their system and it will feature in the journal Instrumentation and Measurement published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.

The system works using Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) which has previously been shown to be promising in epilepsy research. It integrates EEG with electrical stimulation and wireless transmission to detect and suppress absences and other seizures in rats. The system was shown to have a 92%-99% detection rate.

Prof. Fu-Zen Shaw and Associate Prof. David Chang were two of the team members involved in developing the system and they have indicated that while closed loop DBS has been shown again to be promising in this study they need to overcome problems such as interference during different states of activity and then integrate the system into a single portable device.