New Innovative App That Tracks Seizures
Muskaan “Mukki” Gill, E’25, mechanical engineering and history, developed an app that helps individuals to track and manage their seizures. Gill came up with this idea after witnessing her brother’s struggle with recurring seizures.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Erin Kayata. Main photo: Northeastern student Mukki Gill works on ZOR!, an epilepsy management app developed primarily by Northeastern students. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
Northeastern students build app to help track seizures — and it’s personal
Muskaan “Mukki” Gill knows how difficult it can be living with seizures.
Her younger brother, Zor, has Dravet syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes random, frequent and prolonged seizures.
Seeing how this affected her brother’s life, Gill, a fifth-year mechanical engineering and history student at Northeastern University, decided to create a company — named after her brother — that will eventually build a device that can use biomarkers on a patient’s breath to predict when a seizure will strike.
After a co-op at the Sherman Center and receiving funding from Northeastern’s Women Who Empower initiative, she is now launching ZOR! with an app that will help patients and caretakers track their seizures.
Created with the help of 16 fellow students, a beta version of the app is expected to launch on Sept. 1. There is already a waitlist available to interested potential users.
“The main focus of the app is to standardize and centralize seizure management,” Gill says. “My mom puts all of my brother’s seizures and medication changes in a Notes app, and I realized that’s what everyone’s doing. And we have access to so many kinds of data that correlate and resonate with patients, and there’s no way to connect them all. What the app does is it brings that all together.”
Gill got the idea for the app last year while doing I-Corps, a program that helps turn research into commercial success. While doing various customer discoveries, she realized that there’s no standardized or centralized way to track epileptic seizures — and share that information with clinicians.
Gill came up with the idea for a tracking app and worked with Northeastern mentors and Scout to create a website and app wireframes. She then brought together a team of fellow students, 10 of whom are now building an iOS app. A beta version will launch soon through Apple Health, and Gill hopes it will eventually work with other wearable health trackers too.
The app has a calendar where patients can input when seizures happen, what medications they’re on, when they do or don’t take those medications, and when those medications change. The app allows them to track these metrics and then gives personalized insights and charts on seizure activity. These can be exported and shared with clinicians.
Read full story at Northeastern Global News