Every year, 30% of NHS patients with COPD are readmitted to hospital within twelve months—many of those admissions could be prevented with better home monitoring. This project builds an open-source telehealth platform using smartphones and tablets to let patients track their own symptoms and catch deterioration early. The platform is designed to be cheap enough to deploy at scale: the team aims to cut the cost of telehealth technology by at least ten times. If successful, the system would reduce unplanned hospital admissions, lower follow-up costs, and give patients better quality of life with fewer severe flare-ups. The platform is also modular and configurable for other chronic illnesses, so the same infrastructure could eventually support diabetes, heart failure, or asthma management in the home. This is applied research with a clear practical endpoint—not fundamental science—and its impact depends on whether the NHS and other health systems adopt the open-architecture model.
View original technical description
COPD affects 210 million people globally, with 50% of costs (unplanned hospital admissions) that could be avoided with more responsive models of care. 30% of COPD patients in the NHS are re-admitted to hospital once within the year. Within 10 years, COPD will become the third leading cause of death. We propose to develop an open-architecture, open-source, scalable telehealth platform, configurable for chronic illness management in the home, and based on mobile communications technology (mHealth). The project will make use of the latest generation of smartphones and iPads to enable patients to monitor their condition and respond early to worsening symptoms. A key goal of our approach is to bring the costs of telehealth technology down by at least an order of magnitude to enable it to be adopted on a much larger scale. The main deliverables of our project are clinically-validated modules, intelligent algorithms to improve compliance and medication adherence, early detection of deterioration, and integration of mHealth technology within the care pathways for COPD patients. The mHealth platform will deliver improved self-management and a higher quality of life for patients, with fewer severe exacerbations. As a result, it will lead to fewer unplanned hospital admissions and reduced costs of follow-up.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know