Meet your seizure diary: The Mate App
It's a typical Tuesday morning, one hour into work, and you already feel exhausted. Your temples are throbbing, and you just want to go home and crawl under the covers. In fact, it's the third day in a row that you've felt like this, and you're also experiencing more seizures. You know something is off, but you're not sure what it is. You try to think about how much sleep you're getting and how active you've been recently. From what you can remember, nothing has greatly changed, but it's hard to know exactly. After all, you may not be sure what your normal levels of sleep and physical activity are.
What is going on?
Lo and behold: The Mate App
We designed the Mate App to serve as your personal seizure diary, that not only tracks seizures detected by Embrace but also your rest and physical activity. Tracking your seizures is possibly one of the most valuable pieces of information that you can provide to your doctor to help them understand your epilepsy better. Beyond this, tracking seizures, rest, and physical activity helps you become more aware of your lifestyle in general and spot whether any changes are needed.
Let’s dig into some of its coolest features!
Seizure tracking
The benefits of keeping a seizure diary are many. They allow you and your doctor to see how many seizures you're having between visits. The ability to add notes about each seizure, including what you were doing and how you were feeling directly before the seizure could give insights on possible triggers. However, a seizure diary is only as useful as it is accurate. We know that being diligent about record keeping can be cumbersome, but with Mate, we've made the process easy and natural.
Mate aims to help you better understand how seizures interact with your daily activities and rest patterns. It might be that your seizures are triggered by disturbed sleep or generally tend to occur during a certain part of the day or night.
All confirmed seizures from the Alert App are automatically reflected in the Mate App. You can also manually log seizures that Embrace doesn’t detect, such as absence or partial seizures. You can add the duration and any relevant notes to the seizures, such as what physical manifestations occurred and how you felt before the seizure. This information can be very useful to review with your doctor later, so you can see whether the nature of your seizures has changed or remained constant.
Mate allows you to view your seizures right alongside your usual activities to give you more context around your seizures. There’s even a summary of your monthly seizures available directly in the app. Now it takes just one tap to view, print, and share this information with your doctor in order to keep them updated on your treatment. We recommend showing them the Mate App on every visit.
Advanced Rest Analysis
Mate is designed to provide you with comprehensive insights into your everyday rest patterns. It provides detailed statistics on your rest, such as the time you woke up and went to bed, number of tosses and turns, and interruptions. Beyond this, it also tells you how fragmented and efficient your rest period was. This comes in especially handy when you think that you’ve had a good night’s rest but still wake up groggy the next morning with dark circles and puffy eyes. A quick check at Mate’s rest analysis will show you that while you may have been in bed for 8 hours, your sleep was interrupted many times throughout the night, resulting in less efficient rest.
Physical Activity Analysis
Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it. — Plato
Certainly wise words to live by, but how? How can we keep tabs on our physical activity levels to hold ourselves accountable and see if any changes need to be made?
With Mate, it’s all very easy! You can see your step count, distance covered, duration of each individual activity, and total time spent moving. Also, instead of having to log each activity, Mate automatically recognizes walking, running, and sports activities. Moreover, it lets you see how intense each activity is and lets you compare your stats with your 7-day average, so you can see if you are on track or making progress.
Get the app and discover for yourself
These are just some of its great features. Inside the app, you'll discover many more. We hope that Mate supports our users in every step of their journey with epilepsy.
You can download Mate (iOS/Android) for free and start keeping track of your seizures and better understand your lifestyle to see where positive changes can be made!