This article answers a frequently asked question about the use of Somnofy in patients with epilepsy
We currently have Somnofy users with epilepsy. The results vary from user to user. Vitalthings has now conducted several pilot projects showing that some may benefit from the system. However, since epilepsy is a very broad field and individuals with epilepsy exhibit a wide range of symptoms, we cannot guarantee that Somnofy will solve many of their problems.
Somnofy measures movement and breathing. If a person has epileptic seizures at night while lying in bed and there are significant deviations in movement, Somnofy can capture this. It will be interpreted by Somnofy as awake periods, triggering an alert sent via SMS to one or more mobile phones (e.g., the night watch). In our Live Monitor, this will be reflected in the movement indicator from "Quiet" to "Large movement."
At this point, we must emphasize that there will always be a time delay of between 30 seconds to 2 minutes from changes in movement to changes in the Live Monitor and the dispatch of alerts since all data captured must be analyzed by our cloud-based algorithms. Therefore, Somnofy is not suitable for alerting in life-threatening situations. Somnofy is also not medically approved for this type of use and must always be handled under the supervision of qualified medical personnel.
However, Somnofy is good at detecting whether the person leaves the bed. The alerts we can create for you are:
- Out of bed
- Significant increase in movement
- Sudden loud noise
- At low oxygen saturation or high/low heart rate*
*We can connect a blood oxygen monitor to Somnofy (Nonin 3150).
We recommend that we set up all these alerts and tailor them to your needs. We may need to test the threshold levels for a short period along the way.
Some users may "see" their own epileptic seizures in the hypnogram because they have a type of seizure characterized by large movements and convulsions with loud noise/screaming, which Somnofy captures. Other users have different types of seizures where all movement stops, and others show signs of seizures that do not deviate in terms of movement, breathing, or sound.
Several users with known epilepsy report an increased frequency of seizures during periods of little or insufficient sleep. Some believe that it is valuable to know how they have slept recently to estimate the likelihood of seizures at night.