This week the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is showcasing a digital platform developed by Ephion Health which will make it possible to tap artificial intelligence to monitor the functional state of patients in terms of mobility. It has a number of applications including assessing the risk of falls in elderly people with signs of frailty.
Hospital Universitari Sagrat Cor in Barcelona and Ephion Health, a spin-off from the Eurecat technology centre, Hospital Sant Joan de Déu and The Collider, the innovation programme of Mobile World Capital Barcelona (MWCapital), have laid the foundations for running a pilot project aimed at identifying the risk of falls in the elderly.
This “will involve integrating the technology developed by Ephion Health together with Eurecat, currently in use in neuromuscular diseases, to accurately measure how the movement pattern of people with signs of functional frailty is impaired and its correlation with the risk of falling,” says Felip Miralles, Digital Health director at Eurecat.
“The challenge is to develop a tool which makes health professionals’ work easier, thus fostering its rollout in health centres, while at the same time being feasible for a large number of patients,” notes Dani Regaña, Projects and Continuous Improvement director at Hospital Universitari Sagrat Cor in Barcelona. “Plus we are not only talking about the tool itself but also about the preventive actions taken as a result of identifying the risk of falls, which will have a direct impact on health outcomes and quality of life in people with functional frailty.”
When using the platform for elderly people, attention has to be paid to “adapting the system for remote monitoring of patients due to their frailty and the problems involved in frequent visits to care centres and also designing several modules to guide the user or their caregiver through the test,” points out Mireia Claramunt, a Eurecat researcher and Ephion Health’s Chief Technology Officer.
It is also crucial to validate and compare the data gathered remotely with the data collected at the healthcare centre and generate new frailty-oriented algorithms using artificial intelligence tools.
Apart from monitoring frailty, Ephion Health is additionally conducting trials with patients with diseases including Duchenne muscular dystrophy and haemophilia in conjunction with Hospital Sant Joan de Déu; Becker and myotonic muscular dystrophies with Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen; autoimmune diseases with Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, and glycogenosis (Pompe disease) also with Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, the Spanish Pompe Disease Association and the University of Florida.
Ephion Health, a pioneer in monitoring patients with mobility diseases
The platform has been developed by Eurecat and transferred to Ephion Health as part of its technology enhancement operations. It has been validated with people suffering from Duchenne muscular dystrophy as part of the 6MWT+ (The Six Minutes Walk Test Plus System) project, funded and supported by EIT Health since 2019.
The platform currently makes it possible to measure patients’ mobility and functional capacity by integrating up to eight types of biomechanical and physiological sensors which allow comprehensive analysis of movement pattern impairment.
These data are collected through a mobile app and transmitted securely and anonymously to the company’s servers. Finally, the data are analysed using artificial intelligence algorithms to get a single index (a score from 0 to 100) which is directly related to the patient’s state of health.
