It was personal before it was professional.
Seagull Health did not begin with a market. It began with a chart that called a seizure something else — and a question that wouldn't go away.
When my mother's behavioral changes turned out to be silent seizures.
My mother's sudden behavioral changes — confusion, unresponsiveness, episodes that came and went without explanation — were documented as symptoms of her dementia. They weren't escalated. They weren't evaluated neurologically. They were written into her chart in the language aging care uses for things it doesn't fully understand: agitation, sundowning, behavioral episodes.
When those episodes turned out to be silent seizures, I understood that this was not a failure specific to her facility or her care team. It was a structural gap in how aging care is designed to observe, document, and respond to neurological events in dementia patients.
Twenty-five years inside long-term care — and then the research confirmed it.
I spent 25 years as a nursing home administrator. I knew the records from the inside — how nursing notes are written, what language care teams use when something happens that doesn't fit a clear category, how behavioral documentation is generated and maintained, and how easily a seizure event in a dementia patient disappears into the chart as something else.
My doctoral research in clinical nutrition and global health, with a dissertation focused on seizure risk assessment in long-term care, showed me that this wasn't just my observation. The peer-reviewed literature was establishing the same gap — that standard care settings lack the clinical framework to recognize, document, and escalate seizure activity in dementia patients when it doesn't present with convulsions.
Clinical research establishes that up to 40 percent of seizures in Alzheimer's disease are entirely silent — without motor symptoms or obvious signs. They manifest as behavioral episodes: sudden confusion, blank staring, unexplained agitation. They are being documented every day in nursing notes, in monitoring alerts, in incident reports — in language that does not connect them to what the literature says they are.
The intelligence layer that aging care has been missing.
Seagull Health is building the intelligence layer that connects behavioral observation to clinical evidence — translating what caregivers document into structured risk information that clinicians, operators, and technology partners can act on.
It is the same belief, made operational: that an invisible problem changes nothing until it has a name, a way to be measured, and a way to reach the people who can act on it.