We’ve had our share of seizure scares over the past few months. After a particularly frightening incident, we broke down and bought the SAMi-3 Sleep Activity Monitor, which is recommended by the Epilepsy Foundation to help worried parents get a decent night’s sleep.
The camera itself is pretty great (except for the dumb limitation of having to be hooked up to a iOS device). The idea is that it monitors your child and sounds an alarm on your phone or tablet if said child moves too much, i.e. has a seizure. We’ve been lucky enough so far that we haven’t had to test if it works with Finley’s seizures (the medicine seems to be holding him steady now), but we have had quite a few false positives.
Most recently, those false positives are due to our cat.
Even though he doesn’t quite know how to treat her, Finley loves our cat Codex. She is super sweet, too, keeping her claws retracted even as he carries her awkwardly around the house. It’s absolutely adorable, though we do have to stop him before he goes too far.
This past week, Codex has decided to take the relationship a step further and sleep in Finley’s bed. The first time Codex cuddled up with Finley, he had a smile so big that nothing could wipe it off his face.
The problem, though, is that dang SAMi camera.
Unfortunately, despite some nice software features that try to hone in only on the child in the bed, it can’t distinguish between a seizing child and a cat twirling around to get comfortable.
That means every night, always late or early in the morning, we get a loud alarm screaming at us that Finley might be in danger. Only to find a smug cat purring and kneeding her claws into the soft blanket.
It’s worse when it wakes Finley up, which it certainly has a time or two.
Oh well. That’s the price of technology. Better than staying up all night worrying that we won’t be awaken by his status epilepticus.
Below is just one of the videos. I have about 10 of these saved on the tablet: