Epilepsy patients flagged their monitor and cut false alarms

In a small NIH-funded study at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, 13 people in the epilepsy monitoring unit used a phone app to ask about their own EEG and to mark whether the monitor's seizure alerts were real. The National Institutes of Health said the system answered more than 92 percent of questions about their brain activity accurately, and that patient feedback cut its false-alarm rate by about 80 percent across the hospital stay. The work was published in Nature Medicine on October 13, 2026.

This was a handful of patients in a hospital, not a device anyone can take home yet. The researchers said larger outpatient studies are planned. A few patients asked to leave with the system and were told it is not ready. The result is sharper detection inside that unit. It is not a claim that seizures stopped, or that the tool has been shown to work outside the hospital.