Paediatric Epilepsy Remote Monitoring

In February 2008, the Vodafone Portugal Foundation and the West Lisbon Hospital Group signed a co-operation agreement to set up a Paediatric Epilepsy Remote Monitoring system at S. Francisco Xavier Hospital and Egas Moniz Hospital to increase the number and potential success of surgical operations on children with epilepsy. Epilepsy affects five in every thousand people, for many of whom medication is not an adequate solution. In these cases, surgery is sometimes necessary to remove the parts of the brain that are responsible for their seizures. In connection with that procedure, extremely rigorous examinations are made to detect those areas with precision. During these examinations it is often necessary to suspend drug treatment, wholly or partially, which can give rise to the occurrence of seizures. For this reason it is necessary for the child to be hospitalised in a paediatric environment with experience of monitoring epileptic seizures and it is necessary to analyse the traces rapidly to minimise the duration of the examination and the risk period. With the introduction of this new Paediatric Epilepsy Remote Monitoring System, thanks to the use of mobile communications and the implementation of a specially developed software application, physicians can remotely view these examinations (V-EEG or video electroencephalogram) on a computer or PDA at any time, even outside the hospital environment. In other words, they can in effect make these observations on the move …