Can volunteers prove that RATULS helps mitigate the effect of strokes?

July 13, 2014 | by

RATULS, standing for Robot Assisted Training for the Upper Limb after Stroke, is a randomised controlled trial that is looking for volunteers..

The trial seeks to establish whether robot assisted training with the Inmotion robotic gym system improves upper limb function post stroke.  RATULS is looking for people who have only had one stroke (between one week and five years post stroke, with moderate to severe arm weakness) to take part.

Consenting trial participants will be randomised into one of three groups

A) Robot-assisted therapy
B) Enhanced Therapy
C) Usual Care

Patients will receive therapy for 45 minutes, three days per week for 12 weeks. There is funding available for patient travel. Experience so far has shown that patients are keen to take part in the study.

For more details or to enquire about volunteering, please contact karen.dunne@bhrhospitals.nhs.uk

Wearables and mHealth: a few observations

July 13, 2014 | by

The Telegraph reports on the creation of Amazon UK’s wearables store, following on from their US launch that we covered on April 30th. Unlike in the original US launch, locating the store is not that challenging, however it is very much a jumble of products: if you know what you want then you probably don’t need a store to find it; if you don’t, there’s precious little to guide you to find the right product.

One of the wearables they’ll doubtless think carefully before stocking is (more…)

One week to go to the first (free to attend) DHACA-Day July 11th

July 4, 2014 | by

On July 11th, the free-to-join Digital Health And Care Alliance (DHACA) will be holding it’s first members’ day. The primary aim of DHACA-Day is to kick start operational activity within the Alliance. DHACA will respond to members’ priorities through the vehicle of Special Interest Groups (SIGs), which members are free to join in accordance with their interests. DHACA SIGs will generally follow the requirements gathering processes, leading to the generation of assets in the form of Interoperability Profiles, Guidance, Informational Briefings, and Reference Material.

Key to getting off to a good start will be the optimum selection and scoping of SIGs, and so during DHACA-Day we want firstly to hear from members, and then collectively to propose and define the priority SIGs from the key issues emerging.

To begin the process, the morning will comprise a range of motivational speakers talking on key topics such as integrated care, citizen identity, technology enabling care services and future challenges.

The event is being held in the DTG offices very close to Vauxhall tube station and is free to attend – sign up here for a great day!

Are you all sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

July 3, 2014 | by

Even if you are an unpaid Telehealth & Telecare Aware editor, believe it of not, you still get asked to post the most ridiculous stuff by people trying to make out it is important to the world of remote monitoring.

It’s great therefore to be able to put the boot firmly on the other foot and point out a new sensor that seems likely to add real value that is not even, today at least, referencable online. This is the chair sensor, reported by FierceMedicalDevices as having just received FDA approval. The sensor, made by EarlySense and placed under the chair cushion, can apparently measure the heart rate and respiration rate of someone sitting in the chair, without any connection to that person. Sadly I can currently find no reference to it on their website though.

The use envisaged is in hospitals, where patients are in individual rooms and to be encouraged to walk about and sit rather than stay in bed (where, if I read it right on the EarlySense website, they can also be similarly monitored by a sensor under the mattress), with the readout at the nurse station. Changes in either pulse or respiration rate then give warnings of impending problems

I can see lots of other uses too though, supporting independent living.

 

mHealth: too much to blog, too little time

June 30, 2014 | by

As always the question is where to start? Perhaps with the FT headline ‘Powerhouse’ UK leads Europe app development, says research, a piece by Daniel Thomas on some research sponsored by Google & Tech City UK. A full version of the report is here. Key findings are that the UK:

  • Has become the largest tech hub in Europe for app development;
  • Received a third of revenues generated from mobile software in Europe last year;
  • Is the base for almost a fifth of European developers of smartphone applications;
  • is believed to be the world’s second most important tech hub after the US;
  • Has about 8,000 companies involved in app development, employing close to 400,000 people.

Apparently almost half of app developers and designers in the UK generate most of their income from apps, although a fifth generate no income from apps at all but rather see them as a hobby.

Staying with the FT, Prof Mike Short has kindly also pointed this editor to another article entitled (more…)

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” take II (UK)

June 17, 2014 | by

Names again! E-Health Insider today has published a typo-prone summary of a Technology Strategy Board survey of the public’s understanding of “‘health and safety devices”. Unsurprisingly, just as most people would not know what acetylsalicylic acid is (though would be happy to take it when it was called aspirin), so only 10% knew that “‘health and safety devices” meant telecare and telehealth. Not sure I’d get that one right either.

There is better news though. The article also quotes the survey as finding that “38% of people said they did not understand the benefits for both self-care technologies and for health and care apps for smartphones and tablets” which I reckon is fantastically marvellous because it means that 62% of the population did understand the benefits of these technologies, which is a heck of a lot more than I suspect a random sample of GPs would, and shows we have been successful beyond our wildest dreams, especially if those happen to be concentrated in the oldest 62% of the population.

Sadly not all was quite so good as “…the research found that 43% of people would not consider telehealth because they would prefer to be seen by their clinician face to face.” Just as whenever in conversation someone tells me they wouldn’t share their health data, and I’ve asked whether they’d still feel like that if they were lying dying in the street and could be saved only if a clinician had instant access to that data, so I wonder if the question had been posed,  as with our local surgery for non-urgent consultations, “would you prefer to wait 28 calendar days to see your clinician face to face or would you be consider remote consultation within 24 hours”, the answer might be slightly different.

The good side of course is that (more…)

Edinburgh Global Health MSc

June 13, 2014 | by

A quick plug for the above which is a flexible part-time distance learning programme delivered entirely online using a combination of online tutorials, multimedia interactive learning materials, peer to-peer discussion and independent study. It looks very interesting. More details are here.

Claudia Pagliari tells me that the mHealth course will be available as a stand alone option or as part of a certificate of diploma track.

Post-market device surveillance – boring though very important

June 13, 2014 | by

Thanks to Claudia Pagliari for passing me a news item from the Diabetes Technology Society, announcing that the Steering Committee has been assembled for its Surveillance Program for Cleared Blood Glucose Monitors. To quote:

“This program is intended to identify poorly performing blood glucose monitoring products on the market.   This surveillance program will provide an independent assessment of the performance of cleared blood glucose monitors following Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance.  The program will generate information that can assist patients, healthcare providers, and payers in making informed product selections.  The information will also be provided to FDA, which is the government agency that regulates these products.”

So why is this so important? Well one of the things this Editor discovered when doing research into how to encourage GPs to recommend medical apps is that none of the existing organisations that evaluate medical apps appear to recognise adequately that every change of operating system, every upgrade in functionality needs to be carefully checked to ensure the app is still as safe and effective as it was when the app was first evaluated. For example, some apps such as Mersey Burns check that the mobile is running the required operating system superbly; most don’t.

“After a product has been cleared for use by the FDA, there is currently no systematic post-market surveillance program that monitors for ongoing product quality post-clearance. Poorly performing BGM system can interfere with the ability of people with diabetes to reliably monitor their blood glucose levels, and make correct decision based upon the readings.  Inaccurate readings can lead to incorrect actions and therefore to adverse outcomes. Ongoing efforts by the FDA to improve accuracy standards for pre-market clearance would be undermined if performance was not maintained post-market.  Therefore, a post-market surveillance program is critically important to ensure the accuracy of cleared products for people with diabetes.”

So hats off to the Diabetic Technology Society – let’s hope others pick up this excellent initiative, particularly for medical apps. As David Klonoff, M.D., founder of Diabetes Technology Society and a Clinical Professor of Medicine at University of California, San Francisco said “This surveillance program will provide a significant benefit to both patients and manufacturers”.

 

Anyone doubting the benefits of clinical mobile access, read on…

June 13, 2014 | by

Yes of course it is a survey produced by a supplier, so possibly a trifle biased, however EU News’s  item on the benefits of mobile access by community health people makes a very strong case for good access to clinical information when visiting patients that makes sense.

Notable quotes include:

Lack of access to patient information in real-time is affecting the ability of 88% of community health workers to perform their roles…

70% of participants said mobile working technology had resulted in greater patient involvement in care and the management of conditions, and had also improved the quality of visits, with more time focused on treatment.

Almost a fifth of respondents said they spent more than ten hours a week, the equivalent of more than two hours per day, on a combination of travelling back to base to file reports, and other administrative tasks – time that could be spent providing enhanced patient care or home visits.

mHealth: a salmagundi of items

June 8, 2014 | by

Overloaded with Horizon2020 proposal adjudication and conference management (including the first DHACA members’ day on 11th July), this editor has been unable to do much Telehealth & Telecare Aware blogging. However the interesting items have continued to attract my attention and Prof Mike short (especially), Alex Wyke and Nicholas Robinson have continued to add further to the pile (huge thanks to all). So much seems worth highlighting: where to start? Perhaps with the 18 factors to make telemedicine a success, enumerated by the EU-funded Momentum project. Telecare Aware readers will be unsurprised by all 18, which look pretty basic. However many will notice obvious absences, such as the need to adduce evidence of the success of the intervention. Gluttons for punishment will find much more (more…)

Medvivo comes of age (UK)

June 7, 2014 | by | 1 Comment

A year after this editor began his three year stint with Telehealth Solutions, we had a corporate near-death experience, as money got very tight waiting for that first big telehealth order (thankfully it came, courtesy of NHS Norfolk). In those days of reduced salaries, and few employees, we could only dream of becoming a full service remote healthcare monitoring organisation.

This week’s announcement of the acquisition of Magna Careline shows how things have changed in just five years. After being acquired by Moonray Investors, (more…)

Of tricorders and lemmings

May 19, 2014 | by | 3 Comments

Telehealth & Telecare Aware is privileged to break the news of the new Tricorder-like device developed by iMonsys called EIMO, a compliment we take to heart. Watch the demo video:
 

 
It seems perhaps a trifle churlish therefore to point out that there is similar functionality in other products under development, such as Wello, which looks like it is going to become available about the same time, too. However the Wello slips over your phone so is much less intrusive and, some would say, has more cool. There are of course a bunch of competitors for the Tricorder X prize too, perhaps most famously the Scanadu Scout.

To explain where the lemmings come in, this reviewer went to a Wayra event recently (at which there were some brilliant pitches, especially from Cookiesmart (telepathology), Handle My Health, My Clinical Outcomes, Virtually Free and BreakBad, that we hope to cover in a future blog).

On arrival, the warm-up had already started, given by a financier who asked if anyone remembered Star Trek. He went on to say (more…)

Big Data – Royal Society of Medicine 5th June

May 14, 2014 | by

Finding the needles in an ever bigger health information haystack – that’s what the latest RSM conference on 5th June is all about.

There is now a mass of data in the NHS accumulated over the past 60 years about health, its delivery, and increasingly about the individual characteristics, personal health and genetic data of individual and massed patients. The novelty is that this data can now be linked up with data from ever more disparate sources to give answers to questions that only yesterday we could barely conceive.

We have access to a vast data volume, faster, and in increasingly varied ways. We have more papers about how to manage it and more tools. Where are the experts? We have moved rapidly from bytes to gigabytes, and now Petabytes (and soon evenbiggerbytes) of data held by health systems about people.

But how can we use this data rationally? How can Big Data analytics help? (more…)

Wearables – a neat graphic, some thoughts, and a question for readers

May 7, 2014 | by

Thanks to Prof Mike Short for drawing our attention to a neat infographic on wearables. It’s quite something to see an area of personal electronics that is currently so hot that doesn’t yet feature an Apple logo – it cannot be long.

One aspect of wearables that might also make an interesting (though challenging to get right) infographic would be information privacy. Counting apps that turn smartphones into activity trackers as virtual wearables, Jonah Cornstock has an excellent piece just published on how the acquisition by Facebook (more…)

They’re baaaaaack!

May 5, 2014 | by

When this editor was running the Whole System Demonstrator in LB Newham, he watched as a firm of management consultants that were assisting the DH steadily became ‘experts’ in telecare and telehealth delivery as they watched us struggling to deliver a new technology to demanding academic trial requirements. It was almost a caricature of the “lend me your watch; show me how to use it; now I’ll charge you for telling you the time” joke.

A different firm allied with the leading provider of telehealth equipment at the time to offer a kit + redesign care package that shifted many boxes (more…)

Healthcare Apps 2014 – a few impressions

May 4, 2014 | by

This event was held on April 28th-30th in Victoria in London. It was organised by Pharma IQ and clearly had a strong pharma focus (including the charge which at £1995 for industry attendees clearly discriminated in favour of those with big-pharma sized budgets). It was also held just a few days after the significantly lower-priced Royal Society of Medicine event, and in the middle of a London Tube strike, all of which doubtless contributed to the relatively modest attendance (26 paid). I am most grateful to the organisers for kindly inviting me as one of speaker Alex Wyke’s guests.

As mentioned in an earlier post, there was a similarity with the RSM agenda, so I won’t repeat comments made by the same speaker before. The first up was the 3G Doctor, David Doherty, who gave another of his excellent presentations, although the sound engineer sadly made some of it inaudible. After a review of how we had got to where we are, he suggested that the Internet is about to become a device-dominated network. He drew a parallel between (more…)