Health IT, Patient Engagement

Could robots be part of the solution for patient engagement?

Boston Scientific's Connected Patient Challenge highlighted six digital health startups with ideas on how to use big data to improve healthcare. Patient engagement was a popular theme among the finalists, including Pillo, a personal home health robot akin to Amazon Alexa.

ConnectedPatientChallenge

Judges at the Connected Patient Challenge watch finalists make their digital health pitches. The Cambridge, Massachusetts event was also live streamed.

A test-driven patient engagement platform. A device that functions like a Star Trek tricorder for remote patient monitoring. A talking countertop robot for dispensing medications. These were among the six ideas presented at the second annual Connected Patient Challenge.

Developed and launched by Boston Scientific Corp., the challenge is an open competition that asks participants to use big data as a way to drive down the cost of healthcare, improve patient outcomes, and deliver more efficient care. Six finalists presented their ideas at a pitch competition held at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, offices of Google on Thursday. The winner was Medumo, a startup that created an automated SMS and email system to spur patient engagement before medical procedures as a way to help patients prepare. The runner-up was Pillo, an Amazon Alexa-like home robot that keeps tabs on patients’ health in the home and automatically dispenses medications to ensure adherence.

For winning, Medumo received $35,000 in in-kind services from Boston Scientific and $15,000 in Google Cloud credits. Pillo received $15,000 worth of in-kind services and $10,000 credits.

Here are the six startups, in the order they presented on Thursday:

Medumo: Founded by a team of physicians, Medumo was created because they were “increasingly frustrated” by the lack of guidance and information patients were receiving prior to medical procedures, said co-founder Omar Badri. The tech itself is an email and text solution that allows a provider to check in with a patient according to a timeline in the days leading up to their procedure, ensuring that patients take any medication necessary beforehand and that they remember the actual date of the procedure. In a colonoscopy trial of 80 — 40 patients using Medumo, and 40 patients not using it — the startup was able to demonstrate that their tech dropped the no-show rate by 60 percent. Soon, Medumo will run a 10,000-patient trial.

Dive Health: The group presented a machine-learning, open-source, health analytics platform that crunches patient data held in electronic medical records, supported by Duke Health and the Duke Institute for Health Innovation. In an initial pilot, Dive Health used its platform to analyze patient data to predict which patients with rapidly declining chronic kidney disease. The pilot, done with Duke Health, analyzed 46,000 Medicare patients; of that number, 440 were flagged for review, with a smaller subset going on to medical procedures. According to co-founder Mark Sendak, Dive Health’s analytics platform can also be used for other medical conditions like sepsis and diabetes.

Tueo Health: The symptoms of roughly half of kids with asthma are not well controlled, according to co-founder Michael Carchia. Why? The main reason is that patients have to self-report symptoms, which leads to inconsistent and subjective diagnoses and poor medication adherence. Enter Tueo, a device-enabled system for monitoring children’s asthma. Tueo crunches incoming health data, analyzes it to contextualize changes in a patient’s daily life, and provides alerts to parents if the data changes, along with medication guidelines. The system itself is a passive nocturnal sensor attached to the mattress, which picks up heartbeat vibrations on the mattress. Data collected from the sensor is sent to a mobile app, where the data is then analyzed. In a pilot study conducted with Stanford Health, during which more than 2,400 nights of data were collected, Tueo successfully alerted parents to kids’ asthma symptoms one to three days before those symptoms appeared.

Heartbeats: Looking at the shape rather than the rhythm of heartbeats might reveal or unlock information related to clinical diagnoses. “It’s time for a big data approach to heartbeat shape,” said co-founder Michael Shapiro. This was one startup still with an underdeveloped project, but the aim would be to have an open, scalable database of heartbeat shape information, which ostensibly would contain valuable diagnostic information for patients and doctors.

Multisensor Diagnostics: Makers of the MouthLab, a single device that in one minute, using just breath and saliva, can measure a person’s breathing rate and pattern, blood pressure, temperature, pulse rate, blood oxygen saturation, and lung function, as well as do an electrocardiogram trace. The idea is to have primary care physicians give patients their own MouthLab during a visit, said co-founder Sathya Elumalai. Data collected by the device is then sent to a variety of sources, including a mobile app, which doctors can access to keep tabs on a patient’s health and predict any problems. So far, the startup has raised $200,000 and plans to raise $1.5 million this year. A current partnership with Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures may lead to more in-depth testing with the hospital.

Pillo personal health robot

Pillo personal health robot

Pillo: A personal home health robot akin to Amazon Alexa. This desktop robot can see, hear, speak, and even learn from patients in the home in order to generate real-time health data. Being in the home allows Pillo access to a wealth of personal health information. By syncing with wearable devices, Pillo can access biometric data. Because Pillo doubles as a medication dispensary, it can track medication adherence and even re-order medication from an online pharmacy when a patient needs more. Based on the questions patients ask Pillo, doctors and caregivers can get a sense of what the patient is most concerned about. Co-founder Dr. Aiden Feng said the startup has filed two patent applications so far, with two more on the way. The company’s second prototype will be completed this spring, with large-scale manufacturing expected to get underway by the end of 2017 and an initial rollout of the first Pillo devices early next year.

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