Patients help train their own seizure detectors by chatting with an AI app
Most medical devices quietly collect data for doctors to review later. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine built a platform that lets patients talk with theirs. Penn Medicine reports that 13 adults undergoing EEG brain monitoring in Penn’s Epilepsy Monitoring Unit used a smartphone app with an AI conversational agent to ask about their brain activity, view trends, log symptoms and receive alerts. Patients exchanged 1,307 messages with the system and could mark which detected seizures were real and which were false alarms, helping it learn. The proof of concept, published in Nature Medicine, is early, and the team is already preparing studies on deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease.