Companies such as Neurava that develop wearables for people with epilepsy usually focus on tracking bio-signals and monitoring seizures. In 2021, the biopharmaceutical company UCB went beyond monitoring, working with brain health startup NextSense to develop earbuds that could predict epileptic seizures and alert wearers. More recently, in late 2022, the FDA granted approval to Seer Medical, of Melbourne, Australia and Rochester, Minnesota, to market Seer Home, an ambulatory electroencephalograph (EEG) platform for diagnosing epilepsy.
Seer Home consists of two devices: the Seer Sense wearable and a monitoring hub. Users place the Seer Sense device on their shoulders. Electrodes connected to the head and chest record EEG and ECG data. The wearable transmits the data to the hub. The hub stores the data and also captures video synchronized with the test data. The video capture helps physicians evaluate the EEG and ECG data along with body movements and movement artifacts during the testing.
The patient uses the Seer Home system at home for one week. When the week is up, the patient returns the wearable and the hub to Seer. At Seer, physicians review and annotate the data collected during the week-long test. Seer personnel produce a report that the company sends to the patient’s referring physician. The Seer Home system is not intended to replace existing epilepsy testing and monitoring technology. Instead, it augments traditional diagnosis procedures by allowing patients to complete long-term, continuous testing at home, rather than admit to a health facility for a week of testing. According to Seer, there is a significant backlog of patients slated for in-hospital long-term monitoring. Seer hopes Seer Home will help healthcare systems serve more patients so they can begin treatment protocols as soon as possible.
The Seer Home system is a bit old-school. Patients have to send in the hub device device rather than transmit it to a platform in the cloud. Seer’s clinical team accesses, appropriates, and returns data to the patient and a short list of patient friends and relatives, as well as a clinical report to the patient’s doctor. Still, this is a helpful step in moving another aspect of healthcare out of the clinical setting and into the home.
