WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS
Information from within F
A digestible chip-in-a-tablet sends information via an intelligent sticking plaster to patients about their medication and well-being. National Health Executive spoke to Professor Nicholas Peters to find out more
or treatments to be effective it is crucial that patients take their medication properly and at the appropriate times. To this end, a technology has now been developed in the form of a tablet which can transmit important information to a patient’s communications device, such as a mobile telephone.
“Research has shown the degree of compliance with prescribed medication is frequently poor,” says Nicholas Peters, professor of cardiology and head of cardiac electrophysiology, Imperial College London and consultant cardiologist at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.
“This is all about empowering patients - it is all about putting the patient in a position to be informed about their own well being and the benefits of taking their own medication.
“Through being better informed it is hoped that this will encourage patients to take their medication and to play a more active part in responsibility for their own health.”
Central to the system is a chip that can easily be embedded within a tablet or capsule and which is made of trace elements which are found in food and which costs very little to produce. This chip emits a 64 bit signal which is picked up by a patch which is worn on the patient’s body. The signal is emitted when the chip comes into contact with stomach acid, is highly reliable and contains such information as the drug type, dosage and time taken and
60 nhe Professor Nicholas Peters
and greater involvement of formal health care resources. In fact, it promises to improve quality of life by both improving wellbeing and lessening the need for contact with formal health care.
even the batch number from which the drug came.
“The on body patch also logs some physiological measures including heart rate and posture, activity and motion, along with potentially other measurables in the future. This means that there is then the ability to demonstrate the body’s responses and measures of wellbeing as a result of taking the medication.”
This information is transmitted by the on-body patch - which is also inexpensive - through the communications network and fed back to the patient and whomever else they designate on their mobile phone or other dedicated device. The information can be conveyed to the patient through an on screen display in a variety of ways.
It could be a simple thumbs up/thumbs down or it could contain a lot more complexity of information, depending upon what the patient wants and what the patient can cope with using.
“This therefore provides feedback and encouragement at the patient level without invoking the need for greater
“By providing feedback on state of health, patients with chronic illnesses characterised by periodic destabilisation and crises often requiring hospital admission such as heart failure, diabetes, bipolar disease, are encouraged to both be more compliant with their medication and identify early signs of destablisation for which early changes to treatment can avert catastrophic crisis.
“Avoiding hospital admission brings obvious benefits to both the patient and the healthcare system.
“That better compliance is in the interests of our patients is not in question and neither is the ablility of this device to log compliance. By also providing better information to patients about the benefits of taking their medication, they are empowered and encouraged to take greater responsibility for their own wellbeing. The next step is to get the clinical programme going and ideally to establish a route to early appraisal to enable us to begin using these devices in the clinical setting.
“The route to appraisal and implementation of such an enabling innovation might be steamlined - not requiring time consuming and expensive traditional large-scale clinical studies. The challenge for the
regulatory authorities is the need for the incorporation of new enabling technologies in healthcare at a time of need to change the model of healthcare and to innovate to address the constraints in delivering healthcare which we currently face.”
Professor Peters’ involvement as an advisor for this technology from Proteus Biomedical Inc. draws on his experience of using on-body and implanted devices for monitoring disease and wellbeing.
“Whilst some would say that innovation is a luxury that we can ill afford at the moment, I would argue that innovation is exactly what we need to provide better healthcare delivery without increasing cost.
“Healthcare is expensive and recent trends suggest that unless we change the way we do things, it is going to become more expensive and even more exclusive. We need to adapt what are now widely available technologies to reverse that trend by identifying tools that not only improve wellbeing , but also make healthcare more accessible and less expensive, by giving patients a more active role in their wellbeing.
“It is actually very difficult to quantify in part because any technology which is sufficiently accurate to document this is subject to the uncertainty principle whereby the very act of doing the documenting means that people modify their behaviour. This means that you can never actually monitor compliance in a way which doesn’t interfere with the patient’s compliance - usually by them being well behaved.”
Nov/Dec 10
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