Healthy Nuggets #2: Patient standards; AI aiding Parkinson's, hypertension and... lashes

Some encouraging advances to report this week, as always.

First, we are proud to announce that Waracle is now a member of the Professional Record Standards Body (PRSB) , a community-interest organisation established in 2013 to develop clinical standards for health and care records. Health tech is increasingly vital to Waracle; being careful and precise with end users is even more so.

Lorraine Foley , PRSB’s CEO, commented:

“Here at the PRSB, we pride ourselves on working with a range of system suppliers with exciting technologies designed to change lives for the better – and we are even prouder to hear that they consider our standards as crucial to their solutions. Our team is looking forward to working with Waracle and fulfilling our common goal of improving people’s lives through better health and care.”

Feel free to read and comment on Waracle's announcement.

A UK team backed by UK Research and Innovation has taken data from up to 7 years ago, running it through modern AI-driven analysis, and seemingly accurately predicted propensity to Parkinson's Disease.

As detection of Parkinson's often happens after onset, irreversible damage may already be done - so early signals would be a transformational tool in the clinical pathway.

Dr Cynthia Sandor, Emerging Leader at the UK Dementia Research Institute at Cardiff University, commented:

"Smart watch data is easily accessible and low-cost. As of 2020, around 30 per cent of the UK population wear smart watches. By using this type of data, we would potentially be able to identify individuals in the very early stages of Parkinson’s disease within the general population.

We have shown here that a single week of data captured can predict events up to seven years in the future. With these results we could develop a valuable screening tool to aid in the early detection of Parkinson’s. This has implications both for research, in improving recruitment into clinical trials, and in clinical practice, in allowing patients to access treatments at an earlier stage, in future when such treatments become available."

Waracle has been working on an idea to enhance the life of Dementia patients in the past couple of months and will carefully watch this space.

Meanwhile, as highlighted in a Futurity article, a novel artificial intelligence tool could aid physicians in determining the most suitable medication for individuals suffering from high blood pressure.

Close to half of the American population suffers from hypertension. This health condition played a role in almost 700,000 fatalities in 2021, as data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicated. Hypertension heightens the risk of strokes and chronic heart failure.

While early detection can facilitate prevention or mitigation through healthy eating, regular exercise, and reduced alcohol consumption, actual treatment can be complex. Doctors have a range of possible hypertension drugs at their disposal, each with advantages and disadvantages. For instance, beta-blockers slow the heart rate but could trigger asthma, while ACE inhibitors, which relax blood vessels, may result in persistent coughing.

Ioannis Paschalidis, professor and director of the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering at Boston University, said:

This innovative AI-powered model aspires to provide healthcare practitioners real-time treatment suggestions for hypertension, tailored to individual patients' unique attributes such as demographics, vital signs, previous medical history, and clinical test records.

“This is a new machine learning algorithm leveraging information in electronic health records and showcasing the power of AI in health care. Our data-driven model is not just predicting an outcome, it is suggesting the most appropriate medication to use for each patient.”

Back in the UK, a news item from DigitalHealth reveals that a collaborative group of entities has successfully secured a ￡1.3 million grant from Innovate UK for their initiative titled 'Move More Live More'. This programme focuses on curbing the incidence of falls amongst older individuals, utilising the power of artificial intelligence to guide its personalised intervention strategy.

A study by Aston Research Centre for Healthy Ageing, commissioned by @TakingCare, underscores the efficacy of technology-assisted care, such as that employed by the Move More Live More initiative. The research findings indicate the following beneficial outcomes:

• A remarkable 50% reduction in hospital admissions.
• A significant decline in hospitalisations precisely due to falls by 44%.
• A modest yet significant decrease of 5.9% in access to residential care homes.
• A notable delay of 27 months in the need for admittance to residential care facilities.

Steve Gates, managing director at TakingCare, said:

“With an ageing population, it’s more important than ever to have a proactive response to falls among the elderly, ensuring they are armed with the information they need to live independently, safely, for longer.

“The pilot programme has already unveiled fantastic results, and it firmly underlines the positive role of technology when coupled with the personal touch from our Resolution Team members.”

Waracle has recently been putting some time into thinking about the role of sensors in elderly and vulnerable care environments, where existing technology is from the pre-mobile era of panic buttons and pagers. Watch that space!

In putting this newsletter together, using tools like Feedly, it's essential to try and find significant breakthroughs in femtech, which is under-represented in digital health. Still, aside from some encouraging conversations with startups in the area, there must be more news. This week's one update was about AI-driven eyelash enhancement, so I'm linking to it just for completeness, but we can do much better than that.?

Suggestions on good femtech stories are very welcome.

Lastly - according to AI in Healthcare, only some people are convinced of the advance of AI in aiding patients, thinking it should be more about improving medicine generally. Some of the more choice quotes included:

"We need to design and build AI that helps healthcare professionals be better at what they do."

"Healthcare providers are increasingly faced with multiple vendors claiming to have AI. To what extent is their AI learning from your data—or using that data to train models for their other customers?"

"Fix the healthcare system, but not by permanently invading my privacy and altering my relationships with my doctors. No, you may NOT record me!"

We've got a long way to go yet!

Cover image by the CDC on Unsplash.