Can smartphone interactions help to improve epilepsy management?
The unpredictability of seizures and the unclear behavioural outcomes are major concerns for people with epilepsy and may cause increased anxiety. This unpredictability is also an obstacle in capturing and studying seizure-related neurobehavioural alterations. and epilepsy managements as subjective seizure diaries are known to be unreliable. Digital phenotyping of day-to-day smartphone behaviour has proven fruitful in monitoring other neurological diseases. We hypothesize that quantifying smartphone behaviour will help obtain a detailed and objective behavioural map of seizures that can improve the way we evaluate epilepsy in daily practice. In this multicentre observational prospective cohort study we will include 100 persons with refractory focal epilepsy and a high seizure frequency. They will be requested to use the TapCounter app (QuantActions) and keep a seizure diary for three months. We will evaluate the change in touchscreen interactions (e.g. tapping speed, apps used, sleep-wake cycles) surrounding reported epileptic seizures.
