Field-testing on the prototype should be underway by year's end, with a
review and approval by the Food and Drug Administration expected sometime in
late 2011, Cinquegrani said.
Wave Technology already has several patents for software to be used in the
system, which the company plans to sell as a service that would cost $1,500
to $2,500 per patient per year. The projected price tag would be a fraction
of the cost of monitoring and treating epileptic patients for one or more
days in a hospital, Cinquegrani said. The cost of the service could well be
covered by insurers.
Even a typical electroencephalogram (EEG) machine for monitoring the
electrical activity of the brain can cost a hospital $10,000, and the
process often requires using wires to carry data, meaning a patient must
remain in a room during monitoring.
With about 100 epilepsy centers in the nation, it is only possible to treat
and monitor some 1,000 patients at a time today, but the need is obviously
many times higher, Cinquegrani said.
The small amplifier is being built by TMSI based in the Netherlands, he
said. Currently, a larger TMSI amplifier is being used by Wave Technology
engineers to test code for forwarding patient data to a smartphone and then
to a server in a monitoring center.
The University of Chicago Hospital today uses a larger amplifier connected
to a laptop for epilepsy monitoring, Cinquegrani said. That system isn't
mobile, he added.
One of Wave Technology's patents is for an SMS (Short Message Service)
remote application handler, which can be used on a smartphone to launch an
application there. That technology will be valuable for expanding the
functions that the amplifier can be used to detect, such as heart rates and
data from blood sugar tests for diabetic patients, Cinquegrani said.
The amplifier will be equipped with a chip that can store data in case of an
interruption in a wireless connection.
Initially, the development team is working to support smartphones running
Android, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry. The iPhone is also a prime
candidate, but Apple thus far has not exposed all the Application
Programming Interfaces needed by the engineering team, Cinquegrani said.
The cost of building the technology, now being called the Wave EEG Monitor,
comes from revenues generated by other parts of the Wave Technology
business. Forty engineers have worked on the project, which started in
November 2009.
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