MEDICAL & EQUIPMENT DEVICES u Analog Devices


How advances in sensor and digital technology yield better


patient care Giuseppe Olivadoti, marketing and applications director (Digital Healthcare) at Analog Devices, says a new approach using portable or wearable monitoring devices and point-of-care medical equipment promises to improve patient outcomes and reduce pressure on public healthcare facilities


L


arge-scale transformation in the way healthcare is delivered was already under way before the emergence of SARS-


CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, put new impetus into medical innovation. Prior to the 2020 pandemic, aging populations


in developed nations, the near-universal availability of mobile broadband connectivity, and the development of sophisticated sensing technologies were propelling the adoption of more personalised, digital or remote methods of monitoring and diagnosing patients. As the coronavirus pandemic increases


pressure on limited hospital facilities, medical service providers are accelerating the implementation of new technologies for testing and monitoring outside the hospital. Innovations in sensors now enable vital signs to be measured with clinical-grade accuracy at home and specimens tested at the point of care, eliminating the need to send samples for processing at a remote laboratory and producing quicker results for faster diagnosis. This marks a break with decades-old standard medical operating procedure. In the conventional model of medical treatment, a patient visited the hospital when symptoms became apparent, or for a routine annual checkup, and was subjected to a one-time set of tests that would often be sent away for laboratory analysis before diagnosis or a health assessment was made. In many cases, this diagnosis would come long after the original consultation, and based on this single snapshot of the patient’s condition. This approach to treatment made sense when the sophisticated equipment required to monitor vital signs and symptoms was scarce and only available in hospitals or other dedicated medical facilities. The development of new medical sensing technology has created the conditions for a radically different conception of medical


26 April 2023 Irish Manufacturing


treatment. Instead of the large, fixed medical monitoring equipment used in hospitals, the new approach to patient monitoring uses devices that: • •


Are small or even wearable;


Consume little power, so they can operate from a battery; and


•


Provide accurate, clinical-grade measurements.


This enables medical monitoring and testing to be taken out of the hospital and performed in local facilities such as GP practices or in a patient’s home. For even greater convenience for the patient, wearable devices such as patches can operate continuously and discreetly to enable 24/7 monitoring anywhere.


BETTER DIAGNOSIS BY MONITORING IN REAL LIFE


The motivation to implement new remote monitoring technologies is partly due to resource scarcity. The pressure on hospitals when Covid-19 infections peaked in 2020 proved that healthcare systems can quickly be overwhelmed by a rise in demand for acute care services. So, it is a sensible long-term strategy to relocate patients who require monitoring of vital signs from a hospital bed to a clinic, or to their own home.


But just as importantly, monitoring with


a portable or wearable device can provide more useful data and produce better patient outcomes. New medical monitoring technology allows for extended tracking of vital signs such as heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygen


saturation (SpO2), and temperature. Through continuous monitoring, trends and patterns can be uncovered that cannot be detected in the single snapshot that a practitioner can capture in one appointment with a patient. The development in parallel of artificial intelligence (AI) diagnostic technology means that monitoring the stream of data can be automated. Instead of swamping the patient’s physician with data, this AI-based approach uses technology to monitor the patterns in vital signs in the background, and only raise a flag when personal intervention by a doctor is required. By detecting precursor signals that indicate future morbidity, the patient and medical practitioner can work together on changes to medication, lifestyle, or diet to prevent the onset of conditions that previously would have ended up in a visit to a hospital’s acute care ward. In addition, monitoring at home or at a point-of-care facility reveals information about the state of the patient’s health in real life, not in the artificial, and often stressful, setting of a hospital ward. The latest multiparameter wearable sensors can combine vital signs with measurement of other indicators such as motion and sleep to put the medical data in the context of the patient’s lifestyle.


NEW BREAKTHROUGHS IN THE APPLICATION OF SEMICONDUCTOR TECHNOLOGY The introduction of this new mode of patient monitoring is the result of a series of developments in semiconductor technology and computer science in the 21st


Century. www.irish-manufacturing.com


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