Conference News
Philips Healthcare Innovation Summit 2014 This year’s Philips Healthcare Innovation Event marked the company’s 100th anniversary of involvement in healthcare technology research. To celebrate, the event, hosted at The King’s Fund in London, showcased some of the company’s most recent developments and innovations for the healthcare sector. Drawing from projects that Philips has in development from around the World the company was keen to demonstrate technologies that look set to continue this rich heritage of healthcare innovation well into the future. Philips has come a long way since the days of developing early x-ray tubes. On show were technologies dedicated to meeting the company’s ambitions of delivering health technologies that can revolutionise health and wellbeing across the ‘complete care continuum’ of: Prevention; Diagnosis; Treatment; Recovery; and Wellness. A number of interesting digital and mHealth solutions were on show.
REMOTE MONITORING TO SUPPORT PATIENTS DURING CHEMOTHERAPY Around 20% of cancer patients suffer from adverse events, leading to emergency admissions and lengthy hospital stays. Philips is developing a Home Clinical Monitoring service that will enable the cancer patient to self-test their white blood cells via a simple finger-prick and have the results sent to the managing oncologist who follows the progress of the cancer treatment and monitors any progression towards adverse events. Timely clinical intervention will then either prevent or ameliorate the severity of these adverse events thereby improving patient outcomes, supporting cost containment in acute hospitals, and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of care, and overall, reducing the emotional stress on cancer patients. Trials of this technology have already been undertaken at St James’s Hospital Leeds, as well as at a number of other UK hospitals and have so far shown significant potential for improving clinical outcomes.
eICU AND SELF-CARE OF LONG TERM CONDITIONS Healthcare organisations are beginning to see the need for a truly holistic approach to care, which necessitates managing a patient’s journey through the whole care system, irrespective of their entry point. Realistically, this requires planning an integrated care approach to the complete patient journey
and anticipating and managing transitions between the different elements. Philips is involved in a number of projects in the UK in which technology, content and innovative service models are developed in collaboration with partners. This approach helps to develop multi-disciplinary teams who can utilise telehealth and telecare practices to manage the complete care remit between hospital and home environments.
UNOBTRUSIVE CARDIO AND MOTION MONITORING TECHNOLOGY The Company has developed a technology that allows accurate and robust measurement of heart rate, body motion, as well as other cardio-vascular parameters by means of a small unobtrusive sensor that can be, for example, integrated into a watch. The technology uses light reflected by the skin to detect small changes in blood volume and sophisticated software can compensate for body motion during the measurement. The technology with its Heart-Rate measurement function has already been brought to the sports market (e.g. Alpha by MIO, Adidas Smart Run). The devices functions are being extended with additional measurements (e.g. heart-rate variability, breathing rate, energy expenditures, cardio-fitness estimate, motion, etc) with the goal to enable applications in the field of preventative healthcare, early diagnostics, monitoring of (chronically) ill patients at home or at the hospital. Philips also had on show a proof-of-concept demonstration focusing on cases for using Google Glass. You can read more about this in our assessment of Google Glass on page 32. For more information on any of these innovations and more from the event visit: www.philips.co.uk/innovationandyou
29 The Journal of mHealth