The Bhutan Epilepsy Project

The Bhutan Epilepsy Project is an initiative to bring mobile EEG headsets to Bhutan in order to provide neurologic support to a country with no neurologists

This project was conceived of by Dr. Hannah McLane when she was at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2011. While there, she came up with the idea that EEG headsets that are traditionally used for gaming could be applied in a medical setting and hooked up to a mobile phone. This simple idea became what we call The Bhutan Epilepsy Project, and has brought a much needed diagnostic tool to an extremely remote area of the world; this initiative is now being expanded to other countries. Read more about the lack of neurodiagnostic tests in many places in the world here.

Part of the Bhutan Epilepsy Project also involved better understanding the stigma of epilepsy in the region – in order to incorporate traditional understanding into the treatment approach.  The video below documents what we learned, and we also wrote about it in the journal International Health.