PAGING DR BEEP
Wearables for healthcare are back on the list of options for
treatment, as Chris Edwards discovers
The Covid-19 pandemic has shone
a bright light on the capacity of
the healthcare system to cope
with the numbers who need to access
it. But long-term trends in population
profiles were already driving changes
in attitudes in the healthcare sector
to the use of technology and what it
could do to alleviate the burden of
nurses and doctors.
Jacqui Finn, global head of digital
health at Cambridge Consultants,
points to population statistics that
indicate the number of over-sixties will
exceed two billion by 2050.
“Elderly people have more chronic
and persistent conditions. It’s
estimated that, to treat them, we
will need 18 million extra healthcare
professionals,” Finn notes. “We are
looking at a 55 per cent increase
in the next decade. And it takes
ten years to train a physician to be
impactful in an area of their choice.
We need to look at doing things
differently: we can’t continue with
business as usual.”
One area where technology
could make a big difference in both
efficiency and care is in the hospital
itself.
“When I was looking at sepsis
I was really shocked,” says Finn,
pointing to the 50,000 people who
die from it every year. “It’s more than
heart attacks in under-75s. It’s vital
that we detect a deteriorating patient
quickly.”
In the UK, this normally follows
a largely manual track-and-trigger
system. Nursing staff visit each
patient in turn to record six
parameters including breathing,
consciousness and oxygen saturation.
The readings are translated into
scores that if they add up to five
indicate a high risk of sepsis. But
the assessment is episodic outside
intensive care, taking place every few
hours at best. In the hospital bed
serious problems such as sepsis can
set in far more quickly than can be
tracked by the periodic bedside visits.
“We need to move from episodic to
continuous monitoring,” Finn says.
Wearables armed with biosensors
are obvious options. As part of a trial
to work whether electronic sensors will
cut the workload of nurses, a small
hospital in rural Australia claimed to
be the first to deploy an automated
patient-monitoring across all its beds.
The Kilcoy Hospital north of
Brisbane in Queensland only has 20
beds in total but the hospital expects,
if it successful, the technology could
be used not just in other facilities but
to monitor patients as they recover in
their own homes. The core of the trial
is the Patient Status Engine developed
by Isansys, which works with a variety
of sensors.
Keith Errey, cofounder and CEO
of Isansys, reckons the total saving
in nursing could be 15 million hours
in the Australian healthcare system
alone.
An issue for hospitals, which
inevitably have a high throughput
of patients, is the cost of deploying
wearables.
Above: As we move
from episodic
to continuous
monitoring,
wearables will have
an important role
to play
“Continuous monitoring seems a
slam dunk but it’s an expensive thing
to do. Wearable patches have to be
treated as consumables. It’s costly
and not really sustainable. The ideal
is to have monitoring units above
the bed rather than using wearables
and access the six vital signs in a
contactless fashion,” Finn argues.
“I think this type of system could be
available in the next decade. But there
are several hurdles to overcome.”
The current prototype developed
at Cambridge Consultants uses three
cameras: one performing thermal
imaging for skin temperature; and a
combination of visible-light and timeof
flight cameras for heart rate and
blink rate, which is used as a proxy for
consciousness.
The system captures the heart
rate every second and is gradually
improving performance when it comes
to dealing with the wide range of
skin tones that such a system would
need to handle in deployment. At the
moment, people with skin tones at
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