30 Under 30: Hanieh Zahiremami is working on seizure prevention with AI and biometrics

Credit:

Kevin Pilar

Hanieh Zahiremami, 25

Co-founder and CEO, Edee Care Inc.

Life Story: In 2019, Hanieh Zahiremami was visiting her home- town in Iran when she saw a woman at a restaurant fall to the ground and start seizing. As someone who had no idea what seizures were, all Zahiremami could do was panic and yell for help.

“But the guilt of not knowing what to do always stayed with me,” she says.

Five years later, Zahiremami is co-founder and CEO of Edee Care, a Vancouver-based health-tech company leveraging AI, biometric monitoring and behavioural data to help people with epilepsy manage seizures. But the CEO’s love for building things goes further back than her degree in mechatronic systems engineering from SFU in 2021—as a child, she says, she loved “destroying” toys and piecing them back together.

After that first encounter with seizures in 2019, the Vancouverite did a deep dive on epilepsy and came to learn that her own best friend used to have seizures but had never told anyone because of the stigma associated with it. “People think that you have a problem, whereas you’re having a seizure and they just don’t know it,” she explains.

What sets Edee apart from other companies in its space is a focus on detecting, predicting and preventing all types of seizures. “We create a personalized algorithm for [patients] that can really tailor to their triggers and conditions and can help them out in thier own way,” says Zahiremami.

Bottom Line: Since launching in 2021, Edee (Early Detection of Epileptic Events) has raised $200,000 in capital and partnered with BC Epilepsy Society, a VGH epileptologist and the U.S.-based Epilepsy Foundation to develop its solutions. Its flagship product, IDEA (Interactive Daily Epilepsy Assistant), is a SaaS service that collects behavioural data, sends medication reminders and generates reports for physicians. Edee is preparing for clinical studies and seeking clearance for IDEA and the Edee Sensor (a wearable device) to be able to predict and detect seizures.