Today, the way a physician gets an idea of how many seizures a person with epilepsy has had is through the patient’s own record of seizure activity in his day-to-day life. Despite all the technological advances in devices monitoring the human body, a patient’s seizure diary, as it is often called, remains the only means to record and count epileptic seizures outside the clinic. Any insights that such a diary can provide on the effects of medication, seizure frequency or seizure triggers depend on the reliability and detail of the patient’s reporting. Even accurate recognition of seizures is a problem since about half of seizures are not known to the patient.
A new generation of long-term brain monitoring technologies that continuously record brain activity in the clinic or at home is emerging and could greatly improve disease management for epilepsy patients.