Objective:

Smartphone video recordings provide a tool to classify seizure-like events. However, assessing which patients are likely to capture these events on a smartphone video remains uncertain. We hypothesize that patients with nonepileptic events (NEE) are more likely to have smartphone video recordings than patients with epileptic seizures (ES).

Background:

NEE may have a similar appearance to ES but do not show electroencephalographic abnormalities. Smartphone videos can help distinguish ES and NEE when comparing accuracy of review of smartphone video with the gold standard video electroencephalogram monitoring. Differing clinical features between ES and NEE may impact whether a video is recorded, such as event duration. NEE tend to be longer in duration than ES, making them more likely to be captured on a smartphone video.

Design/Methods:

Patients at an outpatient epilepsy practice were screened for if they had a smartphone video of their seizure-like events. If patients had a video, physicians reviewed it with the patient and completed a questionnaire. We conducted chart review on the patients screened to gather demographic data and seizure-type diagnosis.

Results:

We screened 108 patients; 88 (81.5%) had a diagnosis of ES, 7 (6.5%) had NEE, and 4 (3.7%) had both ES and NEE. Of those 108, 15 patients reported having a smartphone video of their event. Among the 15 patients with a video, 8 (53.3%) had ES while 3 (20%) had NEE and 3 (20%) had both diagnoses.

Conclusions:

Though patients with ES formed most of the total sample and the sample with video, there was a marked change in the seizure-type composition. A video recording was reported by 9.1% of total patients with ES only versus 54.5% of total patients with NEE alone or both NEE + ES. This may indicate patients with NEE are more likely to capture a video of their events.