Wearables - keeping children out of hospital
Wearables - smartwatches, fitness bands, stick-on sensors - have been the next big thing in health tech for some time. I’ve seen all sorts of pilot programs using wearables to analyse conditions or provide remote monitoring and have myself taken part in a trial where I’ve strapped on sensors in a project to find a better way of measuring the symptoms of Parkinson’s.
The trouble is most of these trials are at an early stage and it is hard to find examples of wearables actually being deployed in patient care. So I was interested to see this week’s announcement by Liverpool’s Alder Hey Children’s Hospital about a partnership with a tech firm which could ease pressure on services there.
The hospital is teaming up with Isansys Lifecare, a British digital health company, to monitor a group of patients at home. Georgina Horton, head of communications at Isansys, explained to me that the patients had respiratory diseases and would normally be admitted to Alder Hey to be carefully watched rather than for treatment:
“They'd purely only be at the hospital for monitoring purposes. Obviously that would take up bed space, take up nursing resources, it would have an enormous stress on the patients - on the actual children - and on the families.”
Instead they wear sensors strapped to their chests which measure heart rate, respiration rate, oxygen saturation, blood pressure and body temperature and beam it back to the hospital. There, the information can be accessed on tablet computers by medical staff.
In a statement, Alder Hey Hospital said that, at a time when various respiratory diseases were circulating, “the i-digital project will ensure that the hospital can continue to adequately treat sick patients and promptly discharge those who could be monitored in community settings.”
The system, called the Patient Status Engine, has also been deployed at Birmingham Children’s Hospital to provide early warning of any sudden deterioration in a child’s condition.
Like other companies in this field, Isansys has developed its own devices rather than using commercial wearables. Given the huge resources that tech giants have poured into developing products like the Apple Watch or the Fitbit you might think that healthcare companies would see consumer devices as a useful off-the-shelf option.
But Georgina Horton explains that regulatory approval is the issue: “We haven't gone down the whole consumer route as we wanted to prove that it was a fully regulated medical device, that is actually going to be 100% accurate.”
The Apple Watch was launched back in 2014 and there has been increasing stress on its capabilities as a medical device. But while researchers have used it to undertake some interesting studies - such as one which found it could detect the early stages of Parkinson’s - the Watch has yet to offer much in terms of practical health applications for users and medical staff.
Yes, it has a useful feature which detects an irregular heart rhythm (and which has once buzzed for me during a tense Brentford football match) but after wearing an Apple Watch for seven years, I am impatient for it to do more. Let the wearable tech health revolution begin…
Thanks Rory
Wonderful writing.