“Our daughter has suffered with frontal lobe epilepsy all her life, she is now 23, and she endures Complex Partial seizures. In seizure she will shout, turn to one side, lose awareness and grab hold of whatever she is close by. Through medication her daytime seizures were under control though she did endure the occasional night time seizure, all whilst asleep. However over the last 2 years she has become drug resistant and this has meant a return of her daytime seizure an increase in her seizures whilst sleeping. With her being drug resistant she requires somebody to be with her 24 hours a day, 7 days a week as she is at risk of SUDEP (Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy). Due to this my wife gave up work and we have had to adopt co-sleeping, where our daughter sleeps each night with her Mum. This isn’t what our daughter wants at her age so we looked to see what alarms were available, most were sensitive to movement, for which our daughter doesn’t thrash about in seizure, so these were of no use. We came across a monitor that was worn like a watch on the wrist, and via bluetooth interacted with an app that we could download onto our mobile phones. However the tech wouldn’t work for us, so we went back to searching for something that we didn’t know existed. We then came across the Alert-it Pulse companion, which worked for our daughter and us the very first night. We found the equipment and downloadable phone app easy to use, the documentation is easy to follow. My daughter wore the armband for a while before going to bed so that we had an idea of what her pulse rate would be when she relaxed and when it was raised, this we used to set the parameters on the phone app. We then went to bed, my daughter again jumped into bed with my wife and kept the armband on her arm and had the pulse companion on the bedside cabinet, I was in an adjacent bedroom with the pager. Around 2:05 that morning the pager went off, alerting me to the seizure that our daughter was having, what an emotional moment that was for my wife and I to finally have a monitor that worked and detected our girls seizure. Since then it has detected many more giving us not only confidence in a product well made but also relief that our daughter can have some of the independence she wants”
Wayne Lightfoot October 2019
“Just want to say thank you for allowing us to trial the pulse companion. It has been absolutely life changing for us.
Having a child with extreme complex needs is a 24/7 job and being a single parent it was hard having to constantly watch over her for fear of seizures.
The pulse companion has been alerting me at the start of seizures (9 in total so far). Where as before I would wake and sometimes find her mid seizure being completely blue in the face which is extremely frightening and life threatening.
The pulse companion has given us both some independence back. As silly as that may sound, I can now actually put her in to bed early and I can relax watch some TV or do house chores and I know that she is safe. I haven’t been able to do that in 7 years. Before I was having to keep her with me at all times. I am even considering moving her back into her own bedroom if it continues to work successfully!
We had tried other devices such as a SATS machine, bed mat and the embrace watch which were all unsuitable or unreliable.
I would highly recommend the pulse companion to anyone who has epilepsy. It is definitely a device that can be trusted and I like that you can set perimeters to the individuals requirements”
Hannah Chalkley October 2019
