A brain implant offers relief to an epilepsy patient

This is great for partial seizures but not really applicable for anyone with generalized epilepsy (where the origin of abnormal electrical activity in the brain cannot be pinpointed).

Tech is moving along nicely for the latter type of epilepsy though - for anyone interested, the state of the art is the "Embrace wristband" which uses electrical activity across the skin to alert before a seizure occurs. It can pair with mobile devices to send SMS alerts to friends and family - very cool:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26599-smartwatch-detec...

Dumping data out of medical devices, of late, has become a topic that might be of interest to this community. In general, the law requires that a patient be able to access all the medical data that they generate; it's part of their health record, and (with very few exceptions) they have a right to know the contents of it.

Unfortunately, as patients begin automatically generating data -- for instance, pacemakers that automatically dump ECG data to a doctor's office, or implantable neurostimulators that automatically dump EEG data -- there have been real concerns lately over whether they can access the data in a standardized format (or, in reality, whether they can access it at all!). Companies have been somewhat reticent to give patients access to what they perceive as proprietary machine learning data that their device has collected.

Hugh Campos discusses this in a talk he gave at one point: http://boingboing.net/2012/09/28/why-cant-pacemaker-users-re...

It would be interesting to know if patients have access to implanted EEG data (perhaps they could use it to measure sleep, if they could access it?). They should, but I'm not holding out hope.

I wonder what she has to be wary of, now. I assume that being near strong magnetic fields and other things is probably... problematic. (No more MRIs for her, I'd wager.)

I also wonder if it's big enough to set off airport security, or other metal detectors.

I got some idea for hardware hacker with some free time. Epilepsy might go unnoticed for years. Friend of mine was diagnosed just because episode happened during GP visit.

Some non-invasive monitoring device with some sort of recording could be very helpful to many people.

Reminded me of Crichton's "The Terminal Man," though the details are clearly different.

Neat to see this becoming a reality, without the bad stuff that the novel added in.

Similar tech to tDCS which has a plethora of applications as well.

You will be assimilated! Resistance is futile!