Purpose of Project

BenjaminThis project came about because a couple of 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 I 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, he refuses to sleep in a bed, and instead sleeps on the floor behind his bedroom door.   This means that there are no currently available seizure detectors on the market that would be suitable for him.

I think there is a chance we may be able to train him to wear a wrist watch, which is why I am progressing the Pebble Smart-Watch based seizure detector at the moment.

This web site includes information on things I have tried that have not been successful, the two working prototypes that I have developed (Pebble and Kinect based detectors), and links to other similar projects that I know of.

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

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