An AI smartwatch that detects seizures

This is Henry,

a cute boy,

and when Henry was three,

his mom found him having
some febrile seizures.

Febrile seizures are seizures that occur

when you also have a fever,

and the doctor said,

"Don't worry too much.
Kids usually outgrow these."

When he was four,

he had a convulsive seizure,

the kind that you lose consciousness

and shake,

generalized tonic-clonic seizure,

and while the diagnosis of epilepsy

was in the mail,

Henry's mom went to get him
out of bed one morning,

and as she went in his room,

she found his cold, lifeless body.

Henry died of SUDEP,

Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy.

I'm curious how many of you
have heard of SUDEP?

This is a very well-educated audience,
and I see only a few hands.

SUDEP is when an otherwise
healthy person with epilepsy

dies and they can't attribute it
to anything they can find in an autopsy.

There is a SUDEP
every seven to nine minutes.

That's on average two per TED Talk.

Now, a normal brain

has electrical activity.

You can see some of the electrical waves

coming out of this picture
of a brain here.

And these should look
like typical electrical activity

that an EEG could read on the surface.

When you have a seizure,

it's a bit of unusual electrical activity,

and it can be focal.

It can take place in just
a small part of your brain.

When that happens,

you might have a strange sensation.

One could be happening,
several could be happening

here in the audience right now

and the person next to you
might not even know.

However, if you have a seizure
where that little brush fire

spreads like a forest fire over the brain,

then it generalizes,

and that generalized seizure

takes your consciousness away

and causes you to convulse.

There are more SUDEPs
in the United States every year

than Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Now, how many of you have heard
of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Right? Pretty much every hand goes up.

So what's going on here?

Why is this so much more common
and yet people haven't heard of it?

And what can you do to prevent it?

Well, there are two things
scientifically shown

that prevent or reduce the risk of SUDEP.

The first is follow
your doctor's instructions,

take your medications.

Two thirds of people who have epilepsy

get it under control
with their medications.

the second thing that reduces
the risk of SUDEP is companionship.

It's having somebody there
at the time that you have a seizure.

Now, SUDEP, even though
most of you have never heard of it,

is actually the number two cause
of years of potential life lost

of all neurological disorders.

The vertical axis is the number of deaths
times the remaining lifespan,

so higher is much worse impact.

SUDEP, however, unlike these others

is something that people right here
could do something to push that down.

Now, what is Ros Picard, an AI researcher,
doing here telling you about SUDEP? Right?

I'm not a neurologist.

When I was working at the Media Lab

on measurement of emotion,

trying to make our machines
more intelligent about our emotions,

we started doing a lot of work
measuring stress.

We built lots of censors

that measured it
in lots of different ways.

But one of them in particular

grew out of some of this very old work
with measuring sweaty palms

with an electrical signal.

This is a signal of skin conductance
that's known to go up

when you get nervous,

but it turns out it also goes up with
a lot of other interesting conditions.

But measuring it with wires on your hand
is really inconvenient.

So we invented a bunch of other ways
of doing this at the MIT Media Lab,

And with these wearables,

we started to collect the first ever
clinical quality data 24/7.

Here's a picture of what that looked like
the first time that an MIT student

collected skin conductance
on the wrist 24/7.

Let's zoom in a little bit here.

What you see is 24 hours
from left to right,

and here is two days of data,

and first what's surprised us

is the sleep was
the biggest peak of the day.

Now, that sound broken. Right?

You're calm when you're asleep,
so what's going on here?

Well, it turns out that
our physiology during sleep

is very different than
our physiology during wake,

and while there's still a bit of a mystery
why these peaks are usually

the biggest of the day during sleep,

we now believe they're related
to memory consolidation

and memory formation during sleep.

We also saw things that were
exactly what we expected.

When an MIT student
is working hard in the lab

or on homework,

there is not only emotional stress,
but there's cognitive load,

and it turns out that cognitive load,
cognitive effort, mental engagement,

excitement about learning something,

those things also make the signal go up.

Unfortunately, to the embarrassment
of the MIT professors,

the low point every day
is classroom activity.

Now, I am just showing you
one person's data here,

but this unfortunately is true in general.

This sweatband has inside it
a home-built skin conductance sensor,

and one day, one of our undergrads
knocked on my door

right at the end of the December semester,

and he said, "Professor Picard,

can I please borrow
one of your wrist band sensors?

My little brother has autism,

he can't talk,

and I want to see
what's stressing him out."

And I said, "Sure, in fact,
don't just take one, take two,"

because they broke easily back then.

So he took them home,
he put them on his little brother.

Now, I was back in MIT
looking at the data on my laptop,

and the first day, I thought,
hmm, that's on,

he put them on both wrists
instead of waiting for one to break.

OK, fine, don't follow my instructions.

I'm glad he didn't.

Second day, chill,
looked like classroom activity.

A few more days ahead.

The next day, one missed signal was flat

and the other had
the biggest peak I've ever seen,

and I thought, what's going on?

We've stressed people out at MIT
every way imaginable.

I've never seen a peak this big.

And it was only on one side.

How can you be stressed on one side
of your body and not the other?

So I thought one or both
sensors must be broken.

Now, I'm an electro engineer by training,

so I started