FEATURE WEARABLE DEVICES
PHENOTYPING – DIGITAL COACHING FOR A HEALTHIER LIFESTYLE
Chris Van Hoof, imec director of connected health solutions explains how smart healthcare is shifting its focus from diagnostics and therapy to disease prevention and disease interception. Such prevention requires personal digital phenotyping – the use of digital and wearable technology to track health parameters and behaviour over an extended period of time so as to identify risk factors and triggers. To turn this vision into reality, technology innovation is key. Here’s more
A
ccording to the WHO, unhealthy behaviour and lifestyle are at the
root of nearly 80% of chronic diseases, which in turn are responsible for 60% of all deaths. Consequently, 70-85% of the healthcare budgets of OECD countries are spent treating chronic patients. This implies that true prevention has a tremendous potential to save lives and curb healthcare costs. That is why after several years of preparation, imec has set up a dedicated R&D program as a first step towards the ‘world without disease’.
EARLY INTERCEPTION The grand challenge in smart health is disease interception: researchers are trying to establish the link between a disease and the medical factors that can predict it before any symptoms show. Wearable technology and AI will be two of the key ingredients of the solution. There are already a myriad of fitness trackers and sports watches that aim to motivate us to make healthier choices and try to make us fit, but their success rate is unclear: between thirty to fifty percent of users discard them after six months. One of the main reasons is that good intentions are short-lived if you only focus on maintaining motivation through simple metrics (steps, floors, heart rate) and generic advice. To achieve a lasting behaviour change, we need to go beyond motivation and focus on people’s personal ability to change by providing personal triggers.
UNOBTRUSIVELY AND SECURELY This can be accomplished by accurately, unobtrusively and securely tracking a wider range of physiological parameters and by gathering contextual information on our behaviour, habits, schedule, location, activity, etc. Combining detailed physiological data and detailed contextual data makes it possible to create an individual digital phenotype.
10 JUNE 2018 | ELECTRONICS
This digital phenotype can then be used to give highly-personalised feedback and suggestions, e.g. nudging you to take a break after a particularly stressful meeting, or suggesting a light snack just when your stress levels indicate that you are craving that cigarette. Compared to the generic advice now provided by wearables, this kind of personal feedback at the right time is a true paradigm shift. imec together with a number of
partners, have been working for years on the basis of this shift: developing highly- comfortable, medical-grade wireless solutions for the diagnosis and management of cardiovascular, neurological and cardiopulmonary disorders. Their most recent wireless chest patch e.g. combines ECG, respiration rate, respiration depth and actimetry. Due to its compact size and design, it significantly increases patients’ comfort and can be worn day or night to screen or diagnose. imec are currently running clinical investigational studies to explore its potential use for patients with congestive heart failure and chronic kidney disorder. In 2017, imec also
completed a next generation of its MUSEIC chip, a low-power multi- (bio)sensor system-on- chip. It combines a wide range of on-chip electrophysiological sensor readouts with sensor fusion,
Figure 1:
EEG headset for emotion detection
powerful (yet ultra-low-power) signal processing, memory, power management, connectivity, and is at the same time equipped with built-in security and encryption. This platform can be used for very diverse diagnostic applications, but can also feature in smart watches and fitness trackers. Such a dedicated chip allows for reduced complexity at the system and application level. It could, for instance, be used to create a disposable single-use diagnostic smart band-aid that people could buy at the pharmacy for prescribed diagnostic applications. This could significantly enhance chronic patients’ comfort and convenience at a cost that brings it into everyone’s reach.
Figure 2:
The MUEIC chip, a low- power multi (bio-)sensor acquisition IC platform for healthcare applications
TOWARDS LARGE-SCALE STUDY In 2017, imec also carried out a large- scale study that lays the foundation for a personalised digital stress coach, focusing on mental health and well- being. In this study, the research institute did not only measure physiological stress signals, but also evaluated self-reported stress and collected contextual information (via participants’ smartphones). Using wearable technology makes it possible to detect stress outside of the lab, in a real-life context. However, it also comes with new challenges. The data might be incomplete or subject to artifacts. E.g. did someone’s heart rate go up because he was experiencing stress or did he just run up a flight of stairs? For that reason, imec are now developing objective quality indicators to determine when data is reliable enough to be included in the analysis. A second step will then be to develop advanced algorithms to mine these large, partially incomplete and unbalanced datasets.
imec
www.imec-int.com T: +32 478 96 6729
/ ELECTRONICS
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