"You have a 75% chance of becoming ill in seven days. You need to ask for help and start taking your Rescue Pack."
This will be the level of expertise available to patients that self-care at home who suffer from severe respiratory disease, when AI is combined with the latest connected home-use medical monitors and wearables to avoid having to go to hospital.
The Winter of 2017-2018 will be remembered as the time the NHS treated a record number of patients in its A&E departments. Planning for this was extensive, but demand outstripped supply and NHS frontline staff worked around the clock, prompting new calls to find solutions for the challenges in providing health and social care for an ageing population.
The challenge for many patients that have long-term health conditions is knowing when to act and to act sooner. Being able to tell the difference between a “bad day” due to the cold weather and the start of life-threatening exacerbation can be a problem for many patients.
Acting earlier means that an exacerbation can be controlled with steroids and/or antibiotics in “rescue packs” that patients are issued with to keep at home for emergencies. All too often, patients start using their rescue packs too late and their health deteriorates quickly. Many patients admitted as an emergency this winter, were suffering from respiratory conditions set-off by the winter flu.
Aseptika and Zenzium will work together to create a system to automatically warn when the patients health is declining. Looking at anonymised information gathered from previous clinical trials showed that many patients do not treat exacerbations and may not even be aware that they are having them. Some perhaps delay treatment hoping that things will get better by themselves. The inflammation of lung tissue during an exacerbation leads to irreversible damage. Over time and after repeated cycles, patients develop shortness of breath and even more opportunities for infections to take hold, in a downward spiral.
With funding from Innovate UK, the two companies will develop a series of mathematical algorithms, which could be used to prewarn patients of the start of an exacerbation process and to give a risk score for predicted severity to urge earlier action. These patterns are different for each patient but are often repeated. These will be automatically analysed to give a personal detection score that will be continually updated as it learns about each patient and contributes this knowledge to evolve its understanding of these conditions.
The Companies will introduce this Smart LungHealth system in the form of the Cloud-connecting Activ8rlives4 App and will also embed the AI alerting system into Aseptika’s future wearable medical monitor called the BuddyWOTCH, currently in development.
Image: Activ8rlives provides self-care solutions for respiratory patients at home.
About Aseptika Limited (Activ8rlives) www.activ8rlives.com
Aseptika Ltd began developing Activ8rlives in 2010 and is currently developing its third generation of integrated systems, which can be used by consumers and their healthcare service providers using a wide range of platforms or devices to better enable effective and easy self-monitoring. Incorporating sensors and monitors ranging from consumer accessories to in vitro diagnostics (IVDs). Our focus is: respiratory and cardiovascular disease, cancer, promoting physical activity and weight management.
About Zenzium Limited www.zenzium.com
Zenzium Ltd is a Health and Biomedical Data Science Company focused on applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the management of chronic diseases. Specifically, they apply Deep Learning to reduce complexity and increase the understanding associated with self-management, therapeutic discovery and intervention as well as healthcare delivery for chronic diseases. Headquartered at Alderley Park in Macclesfield, Cheshire they utilise the latest HPC (High Performance Computing) technologies and techniques. Zenzium is a Microsoft BizSpark member and part of the Nvidia Inception Programme.
About Innovate UK www.innovateuk.gov.uk
Innovate UK is the UK’s innovation agency. It works with people, companies and partner organisations to find and drive the science and technology innovations that will grow the UK economy.
For more information, please visit: www.activ8rlives.com
Activ8rlives, Activ8rlives.com, Active+ and BuddyWOTCH are trademarks of Aseptika Ltd.