Monitoring technologies can also help with rehabilitation. The main aims of Activ4Life’s Pro V3.8 orthopaedic activity monitoring system, for example, are quicker hospital discharges, fewer post-operative visits to clinicians and an early detection of complications following hip and knee replacements.
The system consists of a wristwatch-sized monitor, attached with double-sided medical sticky tabs to the users’ waist, and a docking station that receives encrypted data from the monitor’s 2D accelerometers. Each night, the monitor is recharged in the dock, while the encrypted acceleration patterns that reveal if a user has been running, walking, shuffling or taking the stairs are sent to a secure server via the mobile phone network, along with the patient’s report on how much pain they have been in.
By comparing the new data with a profile in the database (built up from results of ongoing trials) that matches the age, gender, BMI and post-operative state of the patient, a prediction is made of either degeneration of their condition or improvement. Exercise regimes are then suggested to optimise recovery, and try to stop people doing too much too soon and undoing their operation, or worse still not moving at all.
‘The device shows patients what their daily activity has been and tells them what their clinician has indicated they should do,’ says Dr Ian Revie who designed the system. ‘Self-management encourages the patient to be less poorly, and we’ve shown in our trials that the clinical outcome for patients is 10-12 per cent better, if they are monitored.’ In addition, Revie’s estimates suggest standard use of the monitor would save at least 20 per cent of the current cost of treating each patient. ‘The more treatments can be done in a remote fashion that we don’t really need to see a doctor for, the more clinicians can focus on complex diseases,’ says Revie.