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Le constructeur a noué un partenariat avec une start-up spécialisée dans les capteurs dédiés à la santé pour intégrer de nouveaux types d'analyse à sa montre connectée
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La montre connectée Apple Watch permet de détecter des irrégularités du pouls pouvant signaler une fibrillation atriale dans la population générale et amener les patients à contacter un médecin pour un suivi, selon une large étude américaine présentée le 16 mars au congrès de l'American College of Cardiology (ACC) à La Nouvelle-Orléans.
Purdue Pharma and Geisinger announced today that the first patient has been enrolled in the companies’ upcoming trial of medical wearables as an alternative therapy for chronic pain.
The ResearchKit study looks to see how wearables (in this case, the Apple Watch) can alleviate pain without relying on pharmaceutical painkillers, a commendable goal for a company whose painkilling opioid OxyContin has been at the heart of the US’ ongoing opioid epidemic.
“What we are really looking at is whether we can we decrease pain, improve functioning, and reduce reliance on pain medication,” Dr. Tracy Mayne, Purdue’s head of medical affairs strategic research, told MobiHealthNews in March. “They aren’t all necessarily ... taking opioids, but these are very sick patients with chronic pain and a lot of comorbidities, and I would be very surprised if even some of them haven’t been on pain medication for a long time.”
In the non-randomized prospective trial, 240 adult multidisciplinary pain-program patients receiving treatment within the Geisinger healthcare system will receive an Apple Watch to measure physical activity, self-reported pain, heart rate, medication use, and other relevant variables over 12 months. The watches will be outfitted with a specialized pain app and healthcare provider dashboard that not only integrates with Geisinger’s EMR, but suggests alternative pain treatment strategies such as stretching, mindfulness, and thermotherapy.
“The goal of this technology is to improve patient function and quality of life while reducing the need for analgesic medications. It provides objective measures of numerous aspects of pain, function, and treatment effectiveness so that information can be gathered for the patient and the healthcare provider in between visits,” Dr. Tracy Mayne, head of medical affairs strategic research for Purdue Pharma, said in a statement. “We are pleased to partner with Geisinger on this important initiative and believe real-time data may have the potential to support an improved understanding of chronic pain patients’ experiences and needs.”
Apple has hired a small team of biomedical engineers to work at a nondescript office in Palo Alto, miles from corporate headquarters. They are part of a super secret initiative, initially envisioned by the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, to develop sensors that can non-invasively and continuously monitor blood sugar levels to better treat diabetes, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Such a breakthrough would be a "holy grail" for life sciences. Many life sciences companies have tried and failed, as it's highly challenging to track glucose levels accurately without piercing the skin.
The initiative is far enough along that Apple has been conducting feasibility trials at clinical sites across the Bay Area and has hired consultants to help it figure out the regulatory pathways, the people said.
… speculation has been flying around since the company snapped up about a dozen biomedical experts from companies like Vital Connect, Masimo Corp, Sano, Medtronic, and C8 Medisensors. Some of these people joined the secretive team dedicated to glucose, sources said, while others are on Apple Watch team.
One of the people said that Apple is developing optical sensors, which involves shining a light through the skin to measure indications of glucose. Accurately detecting glucose levels has been such a challenge that one of the top experts in the space, John L. Smith, described it as "the most difficult technical challenge I have encountered in my career." The space is littered with failures, as Smith points out, but that hasn't stopped companies from continuing to attempt to crack this elusive opportunity.
To succeed would cost a company "several hundred millions or even a billion dollars," DexCom executive chairman Terrance Gregg previously told Reuters.
The breakthrough would be a boon for millions of people with diabetes, spur new medical research and open up a potential market for consumers to track their blood sugar for health and wellness insights. It could turn the Apple Watch into a "must have" rather than a "nice to have" for people who would benefit from an easier way to track their blood sugar.
Apple isn't the only technology company eyeing opportunities in the space. Verily, Google's life sciences team, is currently working on a "smart" contact lens to measure blood sugar via the eye (but read “Google’s ‘Smart Lens’ for Glucose Monitoring Not Such a Smart Idea After All!”) and it partnered up with DexCom in 2015 to develop a glucose-sensing device no bigger than a bandage.
Further Reading:
Non-invasive glucose monitoring devises are being called the holy grail for “treating” diabetes. To be more precise, such a device would be part of treatment that warns patients when their glucose level is too high or too low. Patients will still have to inject themselves with insulin, the dosage of which may perhaps be determined by the device. That, of course, would require FDA approval as a medical device. The TRUE holy grail would be a device that monitors glucose levels AND automatically delivers the proper dose as needed – i.e., an artificial pancreas.
Dr. Robert Pearl of the Permanente Medical Group recently implied that wearable tech fitness trackers like the Fitbit don’t serve much purpose in medical practice. While Fitbit does have a disappointing user abandonment rate of 50%, general purpose wearables like the Apple Watch—which has sold an estimated 5-6 million units—has a tiny 6% abandonment rate. And 83% of users state that the apps like the three-rings (activity and stand-up alerts) have contributed to their overall health and fitness. Also, the Hello Heart app reported that Apple Watch users were nearly 4 times more likely to stick with the cardiovascular health management program vs other users. They discovered that 25% of users decreased their blood pressure by 22 points or more.
Coming back to how we get wearable tech and other digital health data into the medical system, Drew Schiller, co-founder and CTO of Validic, a Durham, North Carolina-based vendor that provides access to data from digital health apps and devices (and one of my valued ecosystem partners), agreed that consumer/patient-generated digital data must be provided to a physician and care management team in a form that makes it actionable. “Patient-generated data is useful for showing health trends,” according to Schiller. So if that’s the case, it seems that as we see the wearable tech market doubling in the next four years, there will be a wealth of data available to healthcare systems with an interest in seeing patient trends and influencing their behavior, especially to prevent, manage, and even predict chronic disease. According to the CDC, chronic, behavior-based diseases account for 86% of healthcare costs.
This article discusses the intrusiveness of wearables et al and other issues of these technologies as they relate to healthcare outcomes and communications arena and whether pharma marketers should get on the bandwagon.
The NIH is currently asking for pubic feedback on using smartphones and wearables to collect health and lifestyle data for its Precision Medicine Initiative — an initiative that hopes to collect data on more than 1 million individuals. The NIH’s Precision Medicine Initiative is described as:
a bold new enterprise to revolutionize medicine and generate the scientific evidence needed to move the concept of precision medicine into every day clinical practice
What exactly that means is a bit nebulous, but a New England Journal of Medicineperspective sheds some light:
Ultimately, we will need to evaluate the most promising approaches in much larger numbers of people over longer periods. Toward this end, we envisage assembling over time a longitudinal “cohort” of 1 million or more Americans who have volunteered to participate in research.
Qualified researchers from many organizations will, with appropriate protection of patient confidentiality, have access to the cohort’s data, so that the world’s brightest scientific and clinical minds can contribute insights and analysis.
The NIH is specifically asking the following:
Willingness of participants to carry their smartphone and wear wireless sensor devices sufficiently throughout the day so researchers can assess their health and activities.Willingness of participants without smartphones to upgrade to a smartphone at no expense.How often people would be willing to let researchers collect data through devices without being an inconvenience.The kind of information participants might like to receive back from researchers, and how often.Other ways to conveniently collect information from participants apart from smart phones or wearable devices.
It’s exciting to see the NIH see the potential of digital health. They specifically mention how smartphones and wearables can be utilized to collect a wide variety of data: location information, mobile questionnaires, heart rate, physical activity levels, and more.
There is already a robust discussion taking place in the comments section at the NIH website, and we encourage our readers to contribute.
The NIH is specifically asking the following:
The NIH is specifically asking the following:
Pharma Manager & Geek ... #hcsmeu #hcsmeufr #health20fr
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