Celebrating a decade of partnership advancing digital innovation in epilepsy care

Bridging the gap between epilepsy care and everyday life

Nearly 10 years ago, UCB began working with Byteflies, driven by a shared curiosity around how digital technologies could meaningfully support epilepsy care. What started as an exploration has since grown into one of our longest standing partnerships in this space.

For people living with severe epilepsies such as Dravet syndrome (DS) and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome (LGS), understanding what happens outside of appointments is one of the biggest challenges in care. Seizure patterns, treatment responses, and day-to-day variability are often difficult to capture through occasional clinical visits alone, particularly when compounded by common comorbidities such as sleep disturbances and other non seizure manifestations that significantly influence overall disease burden.

This gap highlights the need for approaches that can bring objective, continuous insights into real-world patient experience, while remaining practical for patients and caregivers. As part of its Digital Care Transformation (DCTx) ambition, UCB focuses on connecting people, data, and innovation to improve outcomes and support more proactive, informed care across the patient journey.

A decade of partnership advancing epilepsy care

Strong partnerships are built over time through shared ambition, trust, and a relentless focus on patient needs.

What started in 2016 with SeizeIT, an early initiative focused on understanding how wearable, multimodal monitoring could complement existing approaches in epilepsy, has since evolved into a decade-long partnership with Byteflies – a Belgian digital health company, exploring how wearable technologies can meaningfully support epilepsy care.

“We’ve always approached this as a journey of learning, focused on understanding real-world needs and building from there.” – Hans Danneels, Co-Founder of Byteflies

From the outset, the collaboration was driven by a shared goal: to explore how objective, real-world data could help bridge the gap between clinical settings and everyday life for people living with epilepsy.

“For me, this work is deeply personal. Seeing the day-to-day realities of epilepsy has reinforced how important it is to better understand what happens beyond clinic walls, and why partnerships like this matter.” - Tanja Kellermann, Digital Care Transformation Lead for Neurology

From early innovation to real-world epilepsy care solutions

Over the years, this collaboration has steadily evolved in both scope and ambition, grounded in scientific rigor and continuous learning. Insights gained from early collaborations have helped shape more structured applications of digital monitoring in epilepsy research.

This evolution is reflected in TETRIS, a real-world study designed to evaluate how remote, multimodal monitoring, including electroencephalography (EEG) and vital signs tracking, can support physicians in making more informed decisions in epilepsy patients living with DS or LGS.

By making patient data visible between visits, this approach aligns with our focus on enabling more informed and timely treatment decisions, supporting proactive disease management in complex neurological conditions.

The role of wearable technology in modern epilepsy care

At the core of this work is Byteflies’ wearable technology, designed for continuous at-home monitoring of brain, heart, and movement data in both children and adults. By combining EEG, ECG (electrocardiogram), and actigraphy, the solution complements traditional video EEG while enabling longer-term, real-world data collection in more natural settings.

The dataset generated through continuous monitoring enables more accurate phenotyping of EEG signatures, including in rare epilepsies where data are often limited. For epilepsy patients and caregivers, at-home monitoring can reduce the burden associated with traditional in-clinic assessments, offering greater comfort and flexibility. It may also support better participation and data reliability in clinical research, which is particularly important in rare and complex conditions.

Scaling the future of epilepsy care through responsible innovation

What we value most in this partnership is our shared mindset: an openness to learn together, the courage to iterate, and a long-term commitment to advancing epilepsy care responsibly.

As we look ahead, we remain focused on learning, executing, and shaping the future of epilepsy care together.