Sleek, smart, and potentially life-saving (Image: Empatica)

Yet another smartwatch launched this week. Called Embrace, it is rather different from the latest offerings from Apple, Samsung and Motorola: it can spot the warning signs of an epileptic seizure.

Embrace was developed by Matteo Lai and his team at a firm called Empatica, with the help of Rosalind Picard at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It measures the skin’s electrical activity as a proxy for changes deep in the brain, and uses a model built on years of clinical data to tell which changes portend a seizure.

It also gathers the usual temperature and motion data that smartwatches collect, allowing the wearer to measure physical activity and sleep quality. Empatica launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo on Tuesday and has already raised more than $120,000. Backers who pledge $169 will receive an Embrace watch.


The idea for the wristband came when Picard and her colleagues were running a study on the emotional states of children with autism, measuring skin conductance at the wrist as part of the study. Picard noticed that one of the children had registered a spike in electrical activity that turned out to have happened 20 minutes before they noticed the symptoms of a seizure. “It shocked me when I realised these things were showing up on the wrist,” says Picard.

Distress signal

The whole point of Embrace is to prevent sudden unexplained death in epilepsy (SUDEP). Its causes are not fully understood, but Picard says they understand enough to know how to reduce the chances of dying after an epileptic seizure. “Death doesn’t happen when people are attended to,” she says. “It’s not understood why it happens, but the data is converging on what we think right now.” During a seizure, hyperactivation of the amygdala makes you stop breathing, she says. But if someone is stimulated or shaken, for example, that can get them breathing again. “Hyperactivation of the amygdala also has been shown to give a large skin conductance response. Our wristband catches this response and can use it as part of deciding when to send an alert,” says Picard.

When Embrace detects an imminent seizure, it can send out a message to the wearer’s predesignated friends or family. And from a device that looks like any other sleek smart watch. “I remember people wearing big epilepsy bracelets when I was a kid,” Picard says. “Nobody wants to wear ugly stigmatising medical technology.”

Katrien Jansen, a doctor at the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL)in Belgium, points out that any form of stress can cause similar signals to the ones Picard’s watch is looking for. “The biggest problem in designing these devices is getting the right detection sensitivity and specificity. Missing seizures, as well as false alarms, are a problem,” she says. But she thinks there is certainly a future for these devices.

Clarification, 24 November, 2014: details of the development and functionality of the Embrace device have been clarified since this article was first published.