Nationwide Children’s Hospital and SeizureTracker.com are introducing a new wearable app to help track seizures called Track It! – available for the Apple Watch in the Apple Store today.
“The benefits of Track It! are not only that patients and parents are able to better track and help their own children but also that they are helping others by participating in a shared database used by researchers studying epilepsy across the globe,” said Anup Patel, MD, attending physician in the Pediatric Epilepsy Center at Nationwide Children's Hospital. “We know seizure counts are often underestimated, so we started working with The Research Institute’s Research Information Solutions and Innovation department at Nationwide Children’s to come up with a technological solution.”
Nationwide Children’s researchers then established a relationship with SeizureTracker.com, whose platform Track It! allows patients with epilepsy to record seizure data, keep logs and share information with caregivers and clinicians. They say understanding the progression of epilepsy on an individual and community level depends on the quality of seizure data reported by patients.
Their database – the largest in the world for seizure tracking – will have logged more than 1.5 million events by year-end. The collaboration linked SeizureTracker’s commitment to providing clinical and research data with the seizure tracking wearable that Nationwide Children’s wanted to make available for their patients and families.
"After a diagnosis of epilepsy, my wife and I quickly realized how important it was to collect good data surrounding our son’s seizures,” said Robert Moss, co-founder of SeizureTracker.com. “The ability to share that information with our care providers made a meaningful impact on how our son’s epilepsy was treated. SeizureTracker.com and the new Apple Watch app will make collecting and sharing quality seizure information much easier.”
By bringing TrackIt! to the Apple Watch, logging a seizure event is as simple as a tapping on the wearer’s wrist. This immediacy and convenience may have profound impact to the amount and accuracy of data being provided to the SeizureTracker.com platform.
The new Track It! Apple Watch app increases access to an extensive seizure diary system for patients and care providers while improving the data quality for research.
“The unique part of this technology is how the app, while keeping data confidential and compliant, interfaces with the Seizure Tracker database, which available to researchers,” said Simon Lin, MD, MBA, chief information officer of The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s. “About 1 in 100 people in the United States have epilepsy and our goal with this collaborative project is to make a tremendous difference for those studying causes and treatments of seizures, ultimately providing best outcomes for patients everywhere.”