A UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship is to provide £2.4 million of funding over four years to establish a “living lab” in Manchester exploring the potential for wearable tech to improve patient care and outcomes.
The fellowship, awarded to Lukas Hughes-Noehrer, lead for computational medicine at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT), will also see the launch of a wearables clinical trial of 800 patients undergoing lung and hepato-pancreato-biliary surgery to test adoption and impact on health outcomes.
Hughes-Noehrer will reportedly be conducting further research into how wearable tech can support people undergoing cancer treatment, and into the potential role of continuous patient-generated data in delivering more personalised care.
The Manchester Digital Health Living Lab will maintain a strong focus on accessibility, trust, usability, and digital inclusion, according to MFT. As well as exploring barriers to the adoption of wearable technologies, it will seek to develop secure systems capable of connecting data from them to electronic health records, and to understand how this kind of patient-generated data can be turned into “clinically meaningful real-time information to support care”.
“Wearables have huge potential to provide more personalised, proactive support, but only if everyone can access, use and trust them,” says Hughes-Noehrer. “By working directly with our communities in Manchester, I want to build a model for wearable-enabled care that is fair, safe and trusted, and that other places in the UK and beyond can follow.”
MFT outlines how findings from the living lab will be used to inform the use of wearables and the development of digitally-enabled hospitals and care pathways across the Greater Manchester region. It also points to alignment with the work of the Greater Manchester Wearables and Remote Monitoring Innovation Cluster (GM-WIC), which was granted £11.1 million in funding from commercial partners and the Local Innovation Partnerships Fund earlier this year.
“The programme will also benefit from the recently signed partnership between the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and MFT to establish the Manchester Sandbox, which speeds up evaluation of emerging digital health technologies in real-world settings,” MFT suggests. “Through the collaboration with the Sandbox and wider regional partners, MFT will help generate evidence on the safety, effectiveness and implementation of wearable-enabled care, while creating clearer pathways for innovators to develop, validate and deploy technologies that can improve patient outcomes across the NHS.”
Wider trend: Wearable technology
Innovate UK has recognised 100 female founders in its latest Women in Innovation cohort, focusing on manufacturing, digital tech, and life sciences, with innovations spanning wearable tech, diagnostics, and AI. 61 of those selected will be receiving a £75,000 grant, along with 12 months of business support and training, Innovate UK reports. The remaining 31 applicants will also receive the 12 months of business support. Projects named by Innovate UK include wearable tech to detect dehydration risk in older adults, looking to prevent avoidable illnesses and reduce hospital admissions.
Microsoft has launched Copilot Health, said to provide users the ability to bring together data from across their health records, wearables, and lab results, applying intelligence to turn insights into “a coherent story”. With Copilot Health, users will be able to record activity levels, sleep patterns, vital signs, visit summaries, medication lists, and test results from more than 50 wearable devices and health records from over 50,000 US hospitals and health providers. AI is then used to identify patterns in health data, reportedly surfacing proactive and actionable insights.
In a recent HTN wearables news in brief, we looked at some of the latest stories from the wearables sector, exploring funding news and emerging use cases including continuous hormone monitoring, integrated cardiac monitoring, sleep prediction, and more.
