MEDICAL DEVICES


clothing. It fits well into the lifestyle to really ensure the patient will continue to use it over a long period of time. Our ECG device was also used in a University


of Stanford study of teenage depression – something that is very common and unfortunately sometimes leads to suicide. Depression is a complex thing as there isn’t just one thing causing it. What we do know is that stress is a big part of depression, but stress itself is complex to understand. People are stressed by different factors in their life. Some people are easily stressed by a simple issue, while it takes more complex issues to stress others out. The study at the University of Stanford was to


basically measure heart rate variability, which is a physiological indicator of the level of stress your body is undergoing. Now, not all stress is bad – a lot of stress is normal. We’re stressed every day when we work, when we exercise or when we’re trying to solve a problem, but sometimes stress can be very detrimental. With an ECG, we can measure that activity throughout the day to see where your physiological stress is at. If stress peaks are maintained on an ongoing basis that can be an indication that you have a bigger problem. Stanford used our technologies to measure that, because you need to have data over a long period of time, so you can see the trend of how long the peaks last.


KP: How did Vivalink conduct in-hospital patient monitoring at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic?


SL: Our devices are designed for remote patient monitoring (RPM), so we were surprised that there has been a lot of interest in using the same technology inside hospitals and clinics. When Covid-19 came around, we started getting a lot of international enquiries. In the US, we have a very technologically advanced healthcare system, but not all hospitals in other parts of the world have that kind of money. In poorer countries, hospitals are pretty basic, and healthcare is provided and monitored in the old-fashioned way, with doctors and nurses running from bed to bed. With Covid, there is a lot of risk of exposure, so hospitals in remote areas looked to use


“Our devices are designed for remote patient monitoring (RPM), so we were surprised that there has been a lot of interest in using the same technology inside hospitals and clinics”


wearable RPM technology to remotely monitor patients from a different ward in the same hospital without being exposed to the infection. Interest initially started off in China, where our wearables got deployed to about 15 different hospitals. We just closed a pretty large deal


four months ago in India and we’ve got another one going on in Vietnam. We have commercial partners in about 25 countries now. It’s comforting to know that these RPM technologies are not only solving problems but are also cost-effective, compared with traditional, expensive hospital equipment. Often, in a developing country, you can’t spend $5,000 on one piece of equipment for one bed in one room. Multiply that by 100 and the cost is crazy. With wearables, the cost is much less  easily onefifth or onetenth of the cost of traditional equipment.


KP: What do you see for the future of wearables in clinical research?


SL: I think wearables are changing the paradigm of healthcare, because healthcare is largely centralised, meaning the population goes to some central locations to get care. When the care has to go to the patient, it tends to be very basic and rudimentary. So, with RPM, I think you can take a higher quality of care to dispersed parts of the world. We’re basically miniaturising technology, both in terms of size and cost, so that it becomes far more usable throughout the world. I think that’s the biggest impact.


Outsourcing In Clinical Trials | 51


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