OLIVE KEOGHrounds up the latest health and workplace innovations
STOPP-START: Helping you find the correct medication
MANY OLDER people suffer from multiple health problems that are treated by different prescription medicines. As the body ages it becomes more sensitive to drugs and adverse reactions to medicines in older people are common.
“One in four of those over 65 being admitted to Cork University Hospital have symptoms of an adverse drug reaction on admission,” says senior lecturer in the Department of Medicine at UCC, Dr Denis O’Mahony.
“In a rapidly ageing population, this is a critical issue – yet up to recently the only criteria in existence to help clinicians address the problem of potentially inappropriate prescribing arising from multiple medications was the Beers Criteria developed in the US. This is a 20-year-old system focused on the US prescriber, which is not used in routine clinical care and many of the drugs referred to in it are not available in Europe.”
As a geriatrician, Denis O’Mahony has a lot of first-hand experience of the side effects older people suffer when their medications or conditions interact adversely. In 2008, O’Mahony, pharmacist Dr Stephen Byrne and geriatrician Dr Paul Gallagher began developing Stopp-Start, a new set of criteria for addressing multiple medication-related problems in older people.
“At its simplest, Stopp-Start is designed to highlight potentially inappropriate medicines with a view to stopping them, but it will also help to get patients on to beneficial drugs indicated for their condition but which have not been prescribed so far,” O’Mahony says.
Developing the new criteria framework was one challenge, getting it into an easily accessible format for health professionals another. To make it happen the promoters turned to Prof Cormac Sreenan and Dr Ken Brown of the Department of Computer Science in UCC, who supervised the development of new software to run the Stopp-Start system. The criteria will be updated every three years by expert panel consultation.
The software project has been supported by Enterprise Ireland and the technology transfer office at UCC. It is in the final throes of development and will be spun out through a fledgling company, Clinical Support Information Systems.
The product is aimed at the international market and should be on shelves next year. The company is looking to raise around €650,000 to bring Stopp -Start to the next stage.
SHIMMER MONITORING DEVICE:
Monitoring your rehab at home
ONE OF THE biggest post-operative hassles for patients is having to make return visits to hospital to monitor their rehabilitation. Irish company Shimmer Research has just launched the first of what it hopes will be a suite of products designed to make the process a lot easier.
Shimmer specialises in wearable sensors that monitor the body’s vital signs as well as movement and motion. Its first product is aimed at those who have had knee replacement surgery. Before the patient leaves hospital they are given a set of exercises to do every day to strengthen their knee. They are also given a carry case that contains a touch screen and a Shimmer monitoring device that is strapped to their knee during their physio work out.
The device records their progress in real time from the comfort of their own home and their physio can assess how they are doing at the touch of a button and make the necessary interventions. The patient can also see an avatar on the screen that gives them feedback on how well they are doing. For example, a good session makes the avatar look happy. The product is on soft launch in Spain in partnership with Telefonica 02. It will go on general release in the first quarter of 2012.
Shimmer Research was formed in 2008 when Irish electronic manufacturing services and integrated supply chain solutions company Realtime Technologies licensed the Shimmer platform from Intel. Since then its subsidiary has been using the platform to develop its own applications, of which the knee unit is the first to market.
Shimmer Research is based in Dublin and to date has been funded by its parent company and revenues from clinical research. It is building a patent portfolio and filing its own IP related to low power processing of sensor data. A number of additional products covering other joint rehabilitation programmes will be released during 2012.
INCA CLINIC: Travel vaccination system that's in it for the long haul
EVEN WITH the recession Irish people are still travelling abroad, often to exotic locations where nasty bugs can ruin a holiday. Most people keep them at bay by getting the appropriate jabs before they go and Inca Clinic is a new travel vaccination application designed to help those administering the shots to cope with the increasing demand from adventurous globetrotters.
The World Tourism Organisation predicts that by 2020, more than 375 million people will travel to long-haul destinations annually, with 125 million of those travelling to “at risk” destinations. This means an increased risk of contracting diseases such as typhoid, hepatitis A, yellow fever and malaria.
Inca Clinic has been devised to simplify the management of a patient’s vaccine schedule, medication and related health information. The application also takes care of stock control, batch number management and vaccine administration for the clinic.
“Inca Clinic enables travel vaccination clinics to become more efficient, profitable and better connected to their customers. It is delivered to clients using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model which reduces costs and the need for IT skills within travel vaccination clinics,” says Richard Boyd, chief executive of the company behind the application, 3Strata Technologies.
3Strata Technologies, which is located at Nova (UCD’s innovation and technology transfer centre) was established in 2010. The company was co-founded by Richard Boyd, a former director of Executive Medical Care, which runs the Tropical Medical Bureau, and Seán Baker, co-founder of IONA Technologies.
Inca Clinic is linked to practitioners by a centralised internet service and travellers will soon be able to access their travel vaccine itineraries and other vital health information using 3Strata’s next application, Inca Traveller. It will be accessible via social media and mobile applications and will provide vaccine reminders and news alerts and will also mean travellers can communicate with their clinic more easily while abroad.
3Strata Technologies has raised seed funding from Enterprise Ireland under its high potential start ups programme with other funding coming from the promoters and private investors. The application was launched at the end of August and customers have been signed up in South Africa, New Zealand and Britain.
“We were very lucky that Enterprise Ireland came on board early in the process and we are now looking for additional funding,” Boyd says. “It’s been very difficult trying to get this off the ground in Ireland because there are absolutely no bank loans available and the investor pool is limited compared with somewhere like the West Coast of the US.”
ROLECONNECT: Matching contractor and employer online
ROLECONNECT IS the brainchild of software engineer Kieran Logan, who has worked on both sides of the software development business as a contractor and as a chief technical officer in search of development staff.
“The use of contractors and/or outsourcing is a growing trend worldwide, not least in Ireland which is one of the biggest markets for IT professionals,” he says. “In 2009, around 12 per cent of developers were on contract. In 2011 this rose to 29 per cent. In countries such as Australia, more than 70 per cent of IT jobs are on a contract basis.”
RoleConnect is not a recruitment agency, Logan stresses. “There are no jobs on the site and no advertisements,” he says. It is more like a dating agency where contractors are invited to post their details and employers browse the database to find suitable matches.
What’s different is recruitment agencies are excluded from becoming members, contractors’ rates are shown openly and potential employers can see their current and future availability.
A company pays a flat fee to access the contractors list and all contractors have their credentials verified and are skill tested before being posted.
The service is free for IT professionals. The focus is on individuals but Logan has plans to develop a system that would allow companies to access ready-made teams.
“We call it placement networking,” Logan says. “The employer puts in the criteria for a position and can see who’s available and what their skills and experience are. We do the introductions and ask for feedback but the relationship is between the individual and the company. Our system processes the data in a pretty sophisticated way to make it as easy as possible for the company to find the person they want in one go.”
Logan’s ambition is to bring the company global, with the initial emphasis on the biggest markets for IT contractors, the US, Canada, Ireland and Britain. RoleConnect will have its full commercial launch early in 2012. The project has been supported by the South Cork Enterprise Board and Enterprise Ireland.
