COPD is one of our most costly health conditions and a common cause of emergency admissions and readmissions to hospital. A new project funded by the Research Council of Norway will investigate whether contactless monitoring, combined with algorithms that analyse breathing patterns, cough sounds and indoor air quality, can provide early warning of a deterioration before the condition requires emergency treatment.
Proactive COPD: prediction and prevention of exacerbations (Prevent ECOPD)
- The project is funded by the Research Council of Norway and is led by Vitalthings’ Chief Medical Officer, Ole Kristian Forstrønen Thu.
- Ahus has clinical responsibility for the requirements work and contributes to data collection and the intervention study.
- NTNU/St Olavs Hospital is responsible for the clinical and scientific aspects of the work on alert thresholds, severity grading and intervention protocols through the BREATHE CAG research group.
- St Olavs Hospital, Helse Nord-Trøndelag and Helse Møre og Romsdal contribute to recruitment and clinical relevance.
By detecting COPD exacerbations at an earlier stage, it is hoped that readmissions can be prevented.
The Prevent ECOPD project is led by the health technology company Vitalthings in collaboration with Akershus University Hospital, NTNU/St Olavs Hospital and several clinical partners. The project is funded with NOK 14 million from the Research Council’s ‘Innovation Projects in Industry’ (IPN) scheme. The project will run for 30 months, with work set to begin this September.
Ongoing, contactless home support
One quality indicator Data from the Centre for Clinical Documentation and Evaluation show that around 30 per cent of elderly patients with COPD are readmitted as emergency cases within 30 days. Exacerbations are often first detected when the patient themselves contacts the health service, by which time the window of opportunity for treatment is narrow.
– Current options for the home monitoring of COPD patients rely heavily on patients taking their own measurements, recording their data or reporting their findings. This is demanding for a group that is often elderly, short of breath and tired, says Ole Kristian Forstrønen Thu, who is Chief Medical Officer and PRRC at Vitalthings and project manager for Prevent ECOPD.
Prevent ECOPD will test an approach in which patients do not need to be physically connected to any equipment or fill in any forms. The project is based on the Guardian platform, where contactless and continuous measurement of respiratory rate has been clinically validated in a hospital ward. ‘Contactless’ means that the technology does not use wires attached to the patient’s body.
“We also see great potential in the data we provide through our sensor technology,” says Forstrønen Thu.
Innovative, disease-specific monitoring
Prevent ECOPD marks a new chapter in contactless patient monitoring. Vitalthings’ technology and data stream have, until now, measured physical condition regardless of diagnosis. With Prevent ECOPD, this validated data stream is being put to a new, disease-specific use: algorithms designed to recognise abnormalities at an early stage in each patient’s clinical course.
– The clinical value lies in what the algorithms are able to deduce from the course of the condition over time, and in the fact that alerts regarding deterioration are issued in a way that prompts action. That is why the project has been set up so that technologists, clinicians, and representatives from the regulatory and commercial sectors work together,” says Forstrønen Thu.
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