Dialog is a concept designed to help people with epilepsy gain a deeper understanding of their condition and make better decisions about their care. It offers an easier way to manage triggers and thresholds, while empowering them to use assistance from family caregivers, first responders, and clinicians as needed.

Dialog consists of a wearable module that collects a range of meaningful data about the patient and her environment, while a smartphone app provides the patient with insights into the factors that trigger events or lower thresholds.

Dialog aims to help people with the condition live their lives to the fullest.

Epilepsy is the third most common neurological disorder in the U.S. after Alzheimer’s and stroke. It affects more people than multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, and Parkinson’s combined. In the U.S., nearly 3 million people have epilepsy, and 50,000 of them die from epilepsy-related cause every year. It is also a relatively underfunded area. In past years it has received less NIH research funding than other conditions, despite having higher annual incidence.

There have been many innovations in other chronic conditions like heart arrhythmias and diabetes over the years, but only recently have we seen clinical innovations for neurological conditions in general and epilepsy specifically. Yet innovations that take into account the human experience still lag behind.

Artefact occasionally takes on passion projects about issues that have an important need that goes unaddressed. Design thinking and new technologies like miniature biometric and environmental sensors, low energy draw displays, and flexible printed circuit boards inspired us to think about how to make managing and living with complex conditions easier.

We decided to focus on epilepsy because we wanted to explore a solution that could improve the patient experience for one of the most complex, unpredictable, and misunderstood conditions.

Through our previous work, we have identified a gap between experiences we currently have with medical devices and the kinds we desire for the future. We’ve developed a framework that guides our work in healthcare in general and medical devices specifically. This framework helps us design for deeper contexts, truer connections, and new data, which will ultimately help us bridge this gap.

We were simply struck by how challenging it is to live with epilepsy. The condition is complex, unpredictable, and misunderstood. The people we talked to told us again and again—they live in permanent anxiety, not knowing when a seizure will start and how that single event could change their life forever, not only physically but also the relationships with the people around them.

The challenge of living with epilepsy is not just about one stage of the condition, rather it is about the experience overall. Our solution needed to address all aspects of the condition. The vision for Dialog is that it will allow people with epilepsy to understand and manage their condition better, and help them live as free a life as possible.

As with all of our projects at Artefact, we created an integrated team of researchers, strategists, industrial designers, and interaction designers whose experience ranged from medical research to wearable devices and natural user interfaces. Building empathy with the people that would use a concept like Dialog was essential, so we also involved patients, family caregivers, and clinicians (epileptologist, neurologists, and neurology RNs) who helped us form the problem statement and provided feedback on concept direction throughout the design process. We explored different form factors aiming to come up with the perfect balance among physical fit and comfort, data quality, and the emotional needs of the patient.

The current solutions that aim to help people with epilepsy often target one narrow aspect of the condition or are very cumbersome to use—while they help, they are rarely aligned with the patient’s lifestyle and often become constant reminders of the condition that defines the person’s life. From the beginning, we followed a human-centered approach and referred back to the community that would use our solution at every stage of the process. That allowed us to select a direction, iterate, and refine a concept that would help the people that are impacted with the condition understand and manage it better, rather than be a constant reminder of it.

At the end of the design phase, we went back to our target audiences –patient, family caregivers, and clinicians—to validate our decisions and obtain feedback. And the feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive. This is exactly the impact we wanted to achieve—push the boundaries on what is possible with design thinking, start conversations about innovative experiences and inspire the community not only to imagine, but to demand more human-centered solutions that help them have better lives.

Dialog is a concept, but many of the individual technology components are currently being developed, prototyped, and tested at industry labs and research universities. We believe that the components will be available within 2 years. Though the technology still has a short way to go, we focused on technical feasibility for the concept from the beginning.

Dialog helps people with epilepsy achieve a deeper understanding and make better decisions about their condition. By considering all stages of epilepsy—pre-event, event, recovery, and living—we were able to design a solution that impacts the entire experience of living with epilepsy, not just one aspect of it.

But our proposed solution is not limited to epilepsy. Our approach to building deeper connections and driving better decisions in the context of the patients’ lives can be applied across a spectrum of chronic illnesses. It could easily extend to a number of other chronic conditions, especially ones where thresholds and triggers which cause events are unknown (Crohn’s disease, migraines, chronic fibromyalgia), conditions which are impacted by environmental conditions (allergies, asthma, COPD), or conditions where frequent but lightweight data logging can provide better care (diabetes, hypertension, heart failure).