Integrating Brain Implants with Local and Distributed Computing Devices: A Next Generation Epilepsy Management System

Talk Summary

Brain stimulation has emerged as an effective treatment for a wide range of neurological and psychiatric diseases. Interfacing implantable brain devices with local and cloud computing resources has the potential to improve electrical stimulation efficacy, disease tracking and management.

Epilepsy, in particular, is a neurological disease that might benefit from integration of implanted devices with off-the-body computing for tracking disease and therapy. Recent studies have demonstrated seizure forecasting, seizure detection, and therapeutic electrical stimulation in patients with focal epilepsy.

In this talk, Dr Worrell will review progress on his Brain Initiative public-private-partnership with Medtronic Inc. to develop a next generation epilepsy management system in which low demand analytics requiring fast response times are embedded in the implanted device and more complex algorithms are implemented in off¬-the¬-body local and distributed cloud computing environments.