[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/blue-blazes.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]Our first ‘Blue Blazes’ of 2015 is the kind of press coverage that makes a PR pro or marketing director cringe.

Intel-GE Care Innovations along with OSF (Order of St. Francis) HealthCare and the University Of Illinois College Of Medicine at Peoria, the latter which have an interestingly named collaborative called Jump Trading Simulation and Education Center, are using the home telecare activity tracker Lively in a COPD patient tracking pilot. Reading the two articles found to date, one can eventually glean that vital signs like weight, blood pressure, O2 levels, lung capacity and qualitative feedback questions, as well as activity, is being tracked. The combination of activity + vital signs is interesting and different, but it takes detective work–viewing the video on the CIProud.com website (which charmingly turns sensors into senors in the headline)–to discover that the activity tracker is Lively, a CI partner. Lively does not report vital signs. How they are being collected remains a mystery as the Peoria Public Radio website article doesn’t furnish details other than a picture with an unidentified desktop hub/display (Health Harmony? It doesn’t look like it). Lack of detail + abundance of typos = bad reportage. In any case, the pilot of 30 patients continues into March, when it will be expanded to 200. Related: OSF/Care Innovations announcement from June 2014.