My Seizure Diary has closed: choosing a replacement
For years, if you asked where to track your seizures, the answer in the United States was My Seizure Diary. It was the Epilepsy Foundation’s own tool, it was free, and it came with the credibility of the best-known epilepsy organization in the country. It was retired in 2022. The Foundation now offers printable diaries and points people towards other apps instead.
If you are only finding this out now, because a link went dead or an old phone finally gave up, this article is for you. It covers what to do about the records you kept there, how to judge a replacement without repeating the same disappointment, and how to start the new diary in a way your neurologist can still use.
A disclosure first, stated plainly: this article is published by the makers of Epilepsy Mate, which is one of the apps you could switch to. We are not a neutral party. What we can do is give you the criteria honestly, name the alternatives, and link them so you can judge for yourself.
First, your old records
Start here, because it is the part with a deadline attached even when nobody tells you so.
If you still have access to an export, a PDF, a spreadsheet, or even a folder of screenshots, save a copy somewhere that is not a phone. Email it to yourself, put it in cloud storage, print it if that is what you will actually do. Those files are a medical record. They are the only evidence of what your epilepsy looked like in those years, and once they are gone no app can reconstruct them.
If you never exported anything, accept the loss cleanly and do not try to rebuild it from memory. A reconstructed diary looks like data but behaves like a guess, and a neurologist making a treatment decision on it is being misled without knowing it. What you can do instead is write one honest paragraph: roughly what years it covered, roughly how often seizures were happening, which medications you were on. Label it as recollection, not record. That is genuinely useful, and it is not pretending to be more than it is.
What to look for in a replacement
The temptation after an app closes is to grab the first thing that works. Six things are worth two minutes of checking, and the first one is the one most people skip.
When was it last updated? Every app store shows this. An app last updated three or four years ago may still install today and still stop working after your next phone update. This is the single best predictor of whether a diary will still be there in five years, and it costs you one glance to check.
Can you get your data out? Ask this before you put anything in. Look for CSV, PDF, or an explicit export button in the settings. If an app cannot answer that question clearly, it is asking you to trust it with years of history on the same terms that just failed you.
Does logging take seconds? The minutes after a seizure are the worst possible time for a long form. If an entry takes more than about half a minute, the diary will quietly stop being kept, and an abandoned diary is worth nothing at all.
Do medication reminders actually get your attention? A silent notification in a stack of forty is easy to miss, and missed doses are one of the most common reasons seizures come back. Alarm-style reminders are worth looking for.
Can it produce something a doctor can read? A clean summary you can hand over or send ahead is what turns months of logging into a better appointment. Raw screens of an app are much harder for a clinician to use in the time they have.
Is the privacy policy readable? Seizure records are sensitive health data. You do not need to enjoy the document, but you should be able to work out what happens to yours.
Where people go instead
The Epilepsy Foundation now points to other apps rather than running its own. The realistic options today include Epsy, a polished free diary with a large education library, currently English only; Seizure Tracker, one of the longest-running diaries with a strong export story and a history of working with researchers; Epilepsy Journal, a simple free logger built by an independent developer; and Epilepsy Mate, ours, which focuses on fast logging including from a watch, alarm-grade medication reminders, doctor-ready reports, and six languages.
Our full write-up of each, with the same disclosure, is in the best epilepsy apps in 2026. Diaries are free or cheap to try, so the honest advice is to install two, log with both for a week, and keep the one you actually keep opening.
Do not lose the habit while you choose
This is the real risk of a shutdown, and it is bigger than the choice of app. People stop logging while they decide, one week becomes three months, and a stretch of their history simply goes missing at the point when their treatment may have been changing.
Paper covers the gap perfectly well. Our free printable seizure diary templates are there to download, and a note on a phone works too. What matters is that the record continues while you shop.
Starting the new diary properly
Two things make the switch clean rather than messy.
Mark the changeover. Put one entry on day one that says where the previous records live, whether an export exists, and what date the old diary ends. In two years, when a neurologist asks why the history starts abruptly in September, that note answers it in a sentence.
Do not backfill from memory. Start from today. If you want the earlier years represented, attach the export file rather than retyping it as if it were logged live. The step-by-step version of this is in how to move your seizure history to a new app.
Then tell your neurologist at the next appointment that you changed diaries and whether anything was lost. It takes ten seconds and it stops a gap in the record being read as a gap in your seizures.
What actually carries over
The habit does, and that is the part that was ever valuable. Health organizations count tracking seizures and possible triggers among the core skills of managing epilepsy, right alongside taking medication as prescribed, and that is true whichever tool you use. An app closing is an inconvenience. Stopping the record is the thing that costs you.
If you want the ground rules again from scratch, how to keep a seizure diary covers what belongs in an entry. And whatever you choose, no diary replaces your medical team: contact them if your seizures become more frequent, longer, or different, and treat a seizure lasting more than 5 minutes, or repeated seizures without full recovery in between, as an emergency and call emergency services.