The group performed a systematic review of medical articles published from January 1, 2000, to May 26, 2021. They identified 935 studies and articles that addressed wearable devices for people with epilepsy. They used strict criteria for choosing the articles, one of which was excluding articles about implanted (i.e., not technically wearable) devices. From there, they narrowed the list to 22 articles. In total, there were 3,299 participants: patients, caregivers, and medical health care workers. The articles addressed 3 main topics: user preferences (16 articles), user experience (5 articles), or both (1 article). Although the researchers had looked back over 21 years, the articles that met the inclusion criteria were published more recently, between 2014 and 2021. The articles were from 14 different countries.

When 2 medical conditions occur together more often than predicted by chance, they are called comorbid conditions. The observation that depression is connected to epilepsy (i.e., that they are comorbidities) raises many questions. How are the illnesses connected? Are both caused by a common underlying brain abnormality? Is there an abnormality of neurotransmitters responsible for both? Finally, does the same connection occur with other chronic medical illnesses? The authors of this study used asthma, another chronic medical illness, as a comparison. They looked at the rate of depression in people with asthma and compared this with that in people with epilepsy. Using the registry data, they were also able to look at the opposite possibility: that is, do people with depression have epilepsy more often?