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Muskaan “Mukki” Gill has seen her brother injured many times when his epileptic seizures strike without warning. So she’s trying to see if there’s a way to predict when a seizure is coming.
Most parents wouldn’t think twice about asking their teenager to run upstairs to grab something. But things are different if your child has epilepsy. A seizure can strike at any moment and something as simple as bringing plates to the sink or walking up stairs can lead to serious injury.
This is what Muskaan “Mukki” Gill saw growing up with her younger brother, Zor, who has Dravet syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes prolonged seizures. These seizures can happen at any time and the condition is difficult to treat with medicine.
The frequency of Zor’s seizures have been anywhere from once every three days to once every month, depending on the efficacy of the drugs he’s on at any given moment. He often falls and cuts his head if he’s standing when a seizure starts.
“It’s a really difficult thing to witness as an older sister,” Gill says. “His seizures are really sudden, so out of nowhere, he just drops. It’s a really tough thing to deal with.”
So when Gill, a fourth-year mechanical engineering and history major, came to Northeastern University, it was with the idea that she would create something so she and her family would no longer have to live in fear of a seizure striking without notice.
Her solution is to create a noninvasive, portable device that will predict when the wearer is about to have an epileptic seizure. She plans to call it Zor after her brother.
“I just grew up knowing that if I’m born into this, there’s got to be something good I can take out of that,” Gill said. “I’ve got to help people like Zor in their positions with the knowledge I have, to the best of my ability.”
As of now, Gill said there’s not much for people with epilepsy to help them predict seizures. Some people have seizure alert dogs, but there’s not much research on how effective they can be, the wait to get one is long, and the costs can run in the tens of thousands of dollars. There’s also additional care and training that goes into having a seizure alert dog that doesn’t make it a great option for people like her brother.
Gill is doing research to see if a seizure can instead be predicted through shifts in one’s biomarkers, like their sweat or breath. If so, her goal is to create a wearable device with an algorithm that can detect these shifts and alert a patient to an impending seizure.
Right now, Gill is in the very early stages of launching Zor. She worked as a Sherman Center co-op last year, which allowed her to work on her business full time, and won funding through Northeastern’s Women Who Empower awards. She is continuing to raise funds and apply for grants, including Northeastern’s Spark Fund, to pay for research she plans to conduct on patients with epilepsy to see if their biomarkers shift before a seizure.
Gill is working with College of Engineering Distinguished Professor Nian X. Sun on the technology. Sun has worked on sensors that analyze a person’s breath to help predict diseases like Alzheimer’s. Gill said she came across Sun’s work while on co-op at the Sherman Center and the two are now working together to get funding for a small preliminary study to look at shifts in patients’ biomarkers before a seizure. Gill has been in touch with doctors at a local hospital and a hospital in the Bay Area who will connect her with patients for the study.
Knowing about a seizure even seconds before it strikes can make a difference, Gill said. Her brother has fallen and injured the same part of his head many times just from being standing when a seizure hits.
“My mom and I always say if we knew just two seconds before, he could’ve sat down,” Gill said. “If he just sat down or laid down wherever he is, then he wouldn’t have cut his head. It’s horribly traumatic for my brother, for us. So if it’s just two seconds, we can do that.”
Gill is graduating from Northeastern in 2026, but she already knows she wants to continue to develop Zor and make it her full-time job once she finishes school. Northeastern’s resources for entrepreneurs have helped her as she builds the venture’s foundation.
She is working with Scout in the fall to help work on an app that can be used by participants when she gets the funding for it and said she’s been able to build a network through Women Who Empower and her Sheman Center co-op.
“(The Sherman Center co-op) was a great opportunity to be funded to work full time,” she said. “There’s nothing like that in the world. I don’t know where else you could be 20, 21 years old and working on your own company and being paid to do that as a student. I feel really grateful to be a part of that cohort. Theo Johnson, who runs that program, is an incredible mentor to me. He’s been really helpful in connecting me with other people in the Northeastern ecosystem. … There’s a lot of resources at Northeastern specifically for entrepreneurship.”