Ashley Galanti, a Ph.D. candidate in biomedical engineering in the UGA College of Engineering is working to create a device that can detect early signs of seizures and alert users in advance. Her journey into research and entrepreneurship wasn’t sparked by academic ambition alone but rather by living with her mom and brother affected by epilepsy.
A challenging part of epilepsy is the unpredictability of seizures. Knowing when one is coming can give you time to find a safe place or alert someone. Trained dogs can detect the onset of a seizure and offer a warning, but there’s no solution for the many who don’t have access to these highly trained canines. Galanti is determined to change that:
She’s tackling her goals by focusing her academic work in technical and business fields. She double majored in journalism and electrical engineering in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication and the College of Engineering and minored in Spanish through the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. After graduating in 2022, she completed a graduate certificate in entrepreneurship from the Terry College of Business and is now in the third year of her doctorate.
“I want to have that credibility behind me and know that I made this device — that if something is wrong, I know how to fix it,” she says. Ultimately, she wants to feel confident bringing her device to the marketplace.
With the technical expertise, communication skills, and entrepreneurial know-how, Galanti is making progress in her research. She’s working on a sensor chip that could detect pre-seizure compounds released as gases from someone’s skin, similar to what trained dogs can sniff out.
“I want anyone who has epilepsy to just erase that fear of the unknown since a seizure can occur at any time,” she says. “It could give peace of mind.”
She intends to outfit this chip in a smart wristband that would measure other biometrics such as heart rate and body temperature. She hopes the data could give someone a time frame for when they may have a seizure, giving them time to get to a safe place and take preventative measures.
Galanti founded the company AMG Detection with the help of the UGA School of Law in 2022.
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Image: Ashley Galanti, UGA photo