Sensor technology to help the ill at home

SENSOR TECHNOLOGY that can remotely monitor people with chronic illnesses and allow them to stay at home for longer could significantly ease the burden of an ageing population on the healthcare system, an international expert has said.

Prof Joseph Kvedar, director of the centre for Connected Health at Partners Healthcare and Harvard Medical School in Boston, was in Belfast this week to give a presentation at the second European Connected Health Summit in Belfast.

Remote monitoring systems are especially effective in chronic illness management, according to Prof Kvedar. “We can improve the quality of care and the cost of services in treating diabetes, hypertension and congestive heart failure.

“We’ve had thousands of heart failure patients through our centres [in the US] and we have had a 50 per cent reduction in patient readmissions to hospital. The outcome is there.”

The ability to monitor large numbers of people remotely for daily signs such as blood sugar levels would also provide real-time information that medical staff could then use to identify trends like geographical distribution and allocate resources accordingly.

This will become a more pressing issue in the years ahead; it is estimated that the number of people aged 65 or older will increase by 59 per cent by 2021. “We certainly can’t continue at the current rate we are: we have to embrace an alternative,” Kvedar says.

Prof Jim McLaughlin of the NIBEC Nanotechnology and Integrated BioEngineering Centre at the University of Ulster says connected health technology could be applied in the home or the hospital ward. Sensors can be used to measure a range of vital signs or behavioural analysis. The data can be sent wirelessly to a central server to be monitored by clinicians.

“That monitoring may be much smarter in that it sees early onsets of illness quicker,” McLaughlin says. “It may mean fewer false positives or negatives in the system, meaning the nursing and clinician provision can be provided in a much smarter way in order to help the patient load within hospitals. That has a lot of economic benefits as well as patient benefits.”

The ability for doctors to access this information quickly would allow them to make better decisions at patients’ bedsides, he adds. “That would dramatically change the management of patients in acute settings, in recovery settings, in long-stay settings and back into the home.”

Tools that allow people to monitor their own physical activity, such as measuring caloric output, can help to motivate people to improve their own fitness levels, Kvedar says. He acknowledges that some home-monitoring devices may not be sufficiently easy to use for older people who may not be comfortable with technology.

“Things should be iPod-simple and they’re not there yet. It’s never simple enough. We can always strive to make it easier for users.”

As an example of how this could work better, Prof Kvedar points to the Nike running shoe chip that wearers use to record their steps and then upload the information to the internet via an iPod. “Uptake on that has been very good. Once you upload five runs, it becomes addictive after that.”