Matteo Lai on epilepsy
From Matteo Lai: Beauty and Medical Wearables | Health | WIRED · · WIREDUK
“It turned out that the little kid had had a seizure and so while they were trying to look at these little changes in body signals they found a huge response in one of the sensors — from there we began a study focused on epilepsy.”
On , Matteo Lai, Cofounder at Empatica, spoke about epilepsy during Matteo Lai: Beauty and Medical Wearables | Health | WIRED on WIREDUK.
About Matteo Lai
Matteo Lai, cofounder of Empatica, discussed the company's medical-grade wearable, Embrace, in a 2015 interview. He stated that the device was designed to be both functional and aesthetically pleasing, noting, "We didn't want to have an ugly medical device like everybody else's." Embrace includes sensors such as an accelerometer, gyroscope, and electrodermal activity sensor, and is intended to detect seizures and alert caregivers via a smartphone. Lai explained that the device originated from research on stress in nonverbal children with autism at the MIT Media Lab, where a student discovered a strong sensor response during a seizure, leading to a focus on epilepsy. Lai said Empatica chose to release Embrace through a consumer path, including a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo in partnership with the Epilepsy Foundation, to make the technology available sooner. He noted that the device was priced at $200 and that for each device sold during the campaign, one was donated to a child with epilepsy who could not afford it. Lai described challenges in bringing the product to market, including convincing risk-averse engineers to join a small company and managing manufacturing complexity. He added that Empatica focuses on neurological conditions such as autism, depression, chronic pain, and anxiety, and that the device collects data continuously to help understand patterns leading to seizures.