Empatica Inc. is an American healthcare company that was a spinoff of MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, MA. It makes medical-grade wearable technology and software for the collection and interpretation of physiological data such as heart rate variability, electrodermal activity, acceleration and movement, skin temperature, and autonomic arousal. Uses include alerting epilepsy patients of oncoming generalized tonic-clonic seizures. The E4 is used by researchers for real-time physiological data capture. The company is headquartered in Boston with offices in Milan and Seoul.
History
Empatica Inc. was founded in 2013 in Cambridge, MA, by Matteo Lai, Simone Tognetti, Maurizio Garbarino and Rosalind Picard. Picard serves as part-time Chief Scientist and Chairman of the board, while Lai is full-time CEO, Tognetti is CTO, and Garbarino is CSA. In 2014, in partnership with The Epilepsy Foundation, Empatica launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo for the creation of a wrist-worn device for monitoring and alerting to grand mal seizures, and help reduce cases of Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy. This device was called Embrace. In January 2018 Embrace received FDA-clearance for adults and became the first medical wristwatch to be cleared by FDA for use in Epilepsy. In November 2018 an updated version of the Embrace, called Embrace2, was released. In January 2019, Embrace2 received FDA-clearance for children ages 6 and up. In May 2020, Empatica launched Empatica Care, a remote health monitoring platform that comprises of the Empatica E4 wearable, an online data visualization dashboard, and a mobile phone application. The platform enables the real-time and continuous measurement of respiration rate, heart rate, peripheral temperature, and heart rate variability.
Collaborations
Empatica is working in partnership with the U.S. Government's BARDA Division of Research, Innovation and Ventures, under the Department of Health and Human Services, to collaborate on the development of a new smart watch which will alert users when they are developing a serious respiratory infection, before any symptoms appear. In June 2020, Empatica renewed its partnership with HHS to validate an algorithm that analyzes vital signs collected via Empatica's sensors to provide an early indication of whether an individual has a high risk of developing a COVID-19 infection. Empatica also partnered with Japanese multinational information and network technology company NEC in a health study to help Japanese employees measure their stress levels, as a response to the phenomenon of karoshi.
Products
Embrace2
Chief Scientist and co-founder Rosalind Picard and her colleagues at the MIT Media lab were working on a wristband to help children on the autism spectrum better communicate their emotional states. One of Picard’s undergraduate students borrowed a couple devices to bring home over the winter break and test them on his autistic brother. A spike in activity registered by one of the devices during this time, attributed to a grand mal seizure event, tipped Picard off to the technology’s potential for seizure detection. The company evolved the device as a smart watch to detect generalized tonic-clonic seizures and alert caregivers in real time via a companion app. The mobile app and subscription service sends out an emergency call and text message to listed caregivers, including their exact GPS location. Embrace is also used by researchers, pharmaceutical businesses, and other healthcare investigators to collect medical quality data for research. In 2017, Sunovion used Embrace in a phase 4 clinical study of Aptiom, a drug meant to reduce seizures in people with epilepsy. In 2018, results were published showing that data collected by Embrace was useful in examining the nausea felt by passengers undergoing zero-gravity flight. A second mobile app called 'Mate' displays sleep time, efficiency, fragmentation, and tosses and turns, as well as levels of physical activity and step count recorded by the smartwatch. It can also be used as a digital seizure diary. A cloud-based research portal enables researchers to virtually view and process the raw data collected by the watch during their studies.
E4 Wristband
The E4 collects real-time physiological data, which can be used to conduct in-depth analysis and visualization. The device is equipped with a PPG sensor, EDA sensor, 3-axis accelerometer, and Infrared Thermopile, and can be used by researchers to measure arousal in individuals within laboratory and/or naturalistic settings to study, for example, stress or other emotions. Studies conducted using the E4 range from testing wearables for predicting substance addition relapses, to measuring the engagement of students in a classroom, to researching predictions in aggressive meltdowns in autism.
Empatica develops physiological and behavioral digital biomarkers for non-invasive patient monitoring and diagnostics purposes. These include convulsive seizure detection, suicidal behavior, and influenza.
