Exploring Epileptic Seizure Detection with Commercial Smartwatches

Some forms of epilepsy can randomly trigger severe seizures that degrade patients' quality of life and may even lead to death. Specially trained dogs that go through a long learning process can sometimes help to warn patients of an imminent seizure, possibly due to an ability to sense subtle changes in the subject's blood oxygen level. In this paper, we present our exploratory study of using a commercial smartwatch with an oxygen sensor to continuously capture data and detect changes in blood oxygen saturation during or ahead of a seizure to warn the patient or emergency contacts. Our data shows a possible correlation between reported oxygen level and a seizure incident, but higher-frequency readings will be required in the future to determine whether accurate prediction with smartwatches is indeed possible.