Wearables prove research chops in U.S. cancer study

Wearable devices are enabling patient-generated data for a U.S. cancer study, as connected technology is proving increasingly useful for medical research.

As reported in an article by Mobile Health News, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) has teamed up with cloud-based analytics startup Medidata to research multiple myeloma. This comes as wearbles are used increasingly in medical applications.

The two New York-based organizations are launching the patient-generated health data trial of 40 patients afflicted with the blood cancer that accumulates in bone marrow. Wearable devices on the subjects will track activity and sleep, while patients will use an app to answer surveys about life quality aspects like appetite and fatigue.

“This is a first exercise and the hope is that we’d be able to take learnings from this exercise to the deployment of mobile health technologies either with this particular partner or with others,” said Medidata’s Kara Dennis, a managing director of mobile health.

“We want to make sure we can support the application of these tools with technology, so we’ve got mechanisms to gather and process and analyze all the data.” “We’re very focused on building tools for those purposes and we want to make sure this can be implemented in a way that patients can effectively use these tools and technologies and that investigative sites can also make use of these tools and technologies,” Dennis adds.

The specific nature of this type of cancer dictated how connected devices were incorporated into the study, particularly in the search for the most useful data on such aspects as quality of life.

“Because of the nature of the disease, myeloma patients are subject to bone pain and fractures,” said MSK hematologist Dr. Neha Korde, who is captaining the study.

“Pain is one of the most difficult symptoms to manage and assess,” said Korde. “We believe that activity and sleep patterns will correlate with self-reported pain levels.”

Encouraging cancer results should lead to larger trial

Once the four-month study is complete, MSK and Medidata hope to use insights gained for the possible development of similar patient-generated health data studies in the future. Korde said that MSK is likely to expand the research to a larger trial if the pilot study proves accurate, reliable and easy for patients to use.

Meanwhile, Dennis said that Medidata may look to partner with others for similar trials if the MSK study goes well.

“There is a broad interest from sponsors we’ve spoken with in quality of life in oncology as a way to evaluate one dimension of therapeutic impact,” said Dennis. “So a number of companies, organizations are interested in understanding, while on therapy, what is the ability of patients to move, to leave their home, to be active, to be productive, to go to work. Those kinds of things along with sleep quality, ‘are subjects waking in the middle of the night’, duration, time to sleep onset, number of night awakenings, those kind of quality of life elements are interesting to many oncology sponsors we’ve spoken with.

Healthcare wearables market fit as a fiddle; to grow to $19B by 2020

The global healthcare market for medical wearables just passed its physical with flying colors, with a new study predicting the segment will grow a respectable 30% by 2020.

An article by Enterprise Innovation reports the results of a study by research firm Frost & Sullivan that predicts the global healthcare market for wearable devices will blossom from $5.1 billion in 2015 to $18.9 billion in 2020. This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.9%.

The report also found that connected consumer health devices will post a CAGR of almost 28% while growth in clinical-grade wearables will reach nearly 33%.

As reported previously, much of this growth will be driven by the increasing number of seniors who will suffer ill health and have the money to tackle their medical issues with new technology.

“Breakthrough technological innovations in wearable electronics, sensors, alternate power sources and wireless platforms are enabling novel applications that would not have been feasible even five years ago,” said Venkat Rajan, Transformational Health Director with Frost & Sullivan. “Moving beyond basic consumer-centric applications, newer wearable devices with more robust and reliable feature sets open a wide spectrum of clinical use cases.”

Clinical uses of wearables will transform market

Chronic disease monitoring and other clinical uses are anticipated to have a transformative effect on care provision models. Though clinical grade devices promise care that is less restricted by geography and traditional scheduling, the report says the new devices need to justify their cost by demonstrating the benefits of improved functionality and data insight.

“Clinical wearables must concurrently justify their value to payers, patients, and clinicians to gain a market foothold,” noted Rajan. “Confidence in the accuracy of collected data is paramount to the utility of information in any medical decision support.”

Despite the expanding horizons for the segment, there are still challenges looming ahead, as seen by the many medical wearables that have struggled to succeed after launching to great fanfare. The report particularly cautions about device-makers wishing to include every bell and whistle, and ending up creating products that are overly complex.

“The effort required on the user side to understand, maintain or properly operate the device would often lead to high abandonment rates after a few months,” the report said.

Energous hearing aid charging tech keeps you listening

With the proliferation of connected devices, comes the fear that our home and work environments will eventually become hopelessly entangled with endless power and data cables. Enter Energous, a maker of wire-free charging technology, which is moving into providing cordless juice for wearables and hearing aids.

The San Jose-based company announced that it is partnering with an unnamed “market-leading specialty battery company in the hearing devices and wearables market.” Energous says the deal will allow it to provide over-the-air contained power at a distance to mobile and IoT devices through its WattUp technology.

Energous President Stephen Rizzone said that the joint development and licensing agreement “represents our first foray into the rechargeable battery market which we believe holds great potential for Energous,”

He said that the deal with the medical devices company was made possible by Energous’ efforts to miniaturize its technology and to keep its price point low. He said the Miniature WattUp transmitter and the WattUp-enabled receiver are scheduled to ship either at the end of 2016 or early 2017.

The WattUp-enabled products will be able to access wire-free recharging at distance via stationary in-room transmitters as well as through small, portable WattUp transmitters.

Energous solution can power up multiple devices

Energous says that its technology’s advantage is that it delivers contained, useable power at a distance to multiple electronic devices. The wire-free charging replaces current charging systems that require users to plug devices into wired systems or to set them on top of a charging mat.

MedGadget recently reported that the worldwide medical wearables market is expected to increase from $2.73 billion in 2014 to $10.7 billion by 2023, amounting to a compound annual growth rate of 16.4% between 2015 and 2023.

More importantly Energous joins the ranks of connected devices that seek to capture a share of the huge global implantable medical devices market. Transparency Market Research found that the U.S. implantable medical devices market alone would grow from $25.2 billion in 2012 to $33.6 billion by 2019.

Richer, sicker seniors to drive medical wearables market growth

The medical wearable devices market is expected to grow over 16% by 2023 thanks to seniors with more money to spend on technology to ease their chronic pain and diabetes.

MedGadget reports that the worldwide medical wearables market is expected to increase from $2.73 billion in 2014 to $10.7 billion by 2023, amounting to a compound annual growth rate of 16.4% between 2015 and 2023.

As populations of seniors are growing worldwide, so grows market for those using wearablesto manage such ailments as diabetes and chronic pain. And with wealth concentrating among the aging populations in many countries, medical wearables will enjoy a more affluent customer base in the medium term.

However, in the near term medical wearables will face challenges in widespread adoption by seniors because of their high cost and the lack of insurance reimbursement policies.

Yet as medical wearables become more user-friendly, seniors worldwide will increasingly adopt medical wearables to track and manage their health conditions.

Key players in the medical wearables market include: Fitbit, Koninklijke Philips, Polar Electro, OMRON, Cleveland Medical Devices and Medtronic.

North America dominating medical wearables market today

Geographically, North America dominated the medical wearables market in 2014 thanks to increased health and fitness awareness and the role innovative connected devices play in that realm. The fitness and sports segment is expected to continue to dominate medical wearable use in both North America and globally over the next few years.

But further in the future the Asia Pacific region will emerge as a major driver of medical wearables, as massive diabetic populations in India and China turn to technology to manage their health conditions. The rising per capita wealth of the emerging middle class in Asia will allow those populations to buy more expensive technology.

As well, hospitals and healthcare centers will increasingly adopt more diagnostic and therapeutic wearable devices for such uses as neuromonitoring, tracking vital signs and fetal monitoring. And as the new medical wearables are far less cumbersome and more versatile than existing equipment, connected devices will steadily replace the bigger medical devices currently in use over time.

U.S. VA explores protecting your hacking cough from hacking

Though cybercriminals haven’t yet started hacking pacemakers for kicks, the U.S. Veteran Affairs Department (VA) has launched a new project to ensure connected medical devices are protected.

As reported by Next Gov.com, VA has begun fact-finding information on methods to safeguard wirelessly connected medical equipment from malicious cyber attacks.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly used in health applications, more and more connected devices are being employed by health centers and hospitals for patient monitoring and diagnosis.

VA is concerned that the wireless nature of the connectivity allows these devices to be vulnerable to nefarious actors. And so the department is undertaking a “comprehensive, defense-in-depth” initiative that seeks to secure IoT equipment on hospital networks from any malicious attacks.

VA’s interest in bolstering IoT security follows a recent attack on the MedStar Health network in Washington, D.C. which saw its patient records blocked by ransomware.

As more devices become integrated into healthcare facilities, concerns for hospital network security are increasing in tandem. This concern was behind VA’s new cybersecurity strategy launched last fall that focused on securing medical devices and general medical cybersecurity.

VA has set guidelines for the IoT security needs

According to the NextGov report, VA’s requirement for medical IoT security include: automation; scalability to millions of devices; consideration for device time lags; and the capacity to generate reports on protocols, threat indicators and device traffic volume.

And this data integrity issue is one that will grow ever thornier as medical wearables and implantables become more commonplace.

ReadWrite recently wrote that RFID chips, for example, could replace medical alerts bracelets and avoid drug interactions caused by mis-prescribing drugs but “a number of people have told me that the ease of removing an RFID chip (with a scalpel presumably) could result in identity or financial theft. Others raise the issues of hacking and long-term medical complications caused by implants. But regardless of resistance, this technology is here, it is being used successfully for a range of purposes and it will be an integral part of wearables of the future.”