Epilepsy is the most common serious brain disorder in every country, and probably the most universal of all medical disorders. In Europe six million people currently have epilepsy and fifteen million will have epilepsy at some time of their lives. Currently nearly 30% of these people cannot be treated by therapeutics based on pharmacological anticonvulsive medication or resective surgery and are completely subjected to the sudden and unforeseen seizures strike that have a strong impact on their everyday life, with temporary impairments on their motor capability, perception, speech, memory or conscience.

Epilepsy costs Europe over 20 billion Euros every year, most of which accounts for the untreatable patients; an amount that could be significantly reduced if effective action was undertaken.

The project intends to develop an intelligent alarm system, transportable by the patient, measuring the brain dynamical activity, capable of predicting the seizures; allowing the patient to assess the risk of his actual situation and improving his safety. The system is based on multi-signal information (EEG, ECG and others), intelligent data processing and wireless communications.

The project will develop knowledge (in data analysis), algorithms (of seizure prediction) and technologies (of data acquisition and wireless transmission) that integrated into an intelligent system will be an important step forward in economical affordable personal healthcare systems for neurological applications. A distributed European Epilepsy Database will also be built by the project, including all the available information about epileptic patients, allowing semantic mining based on multi-modal, multi-signal and multidimensional data.

The EPILEPSIA consortium consists of seven partners from 4 countries: 3 academic, 3 clinics, 1 industrial SME company, covering the whole value chain from theoretical conception to market products and final users.