Evidencing Vibroacoustic Sensing for Inflammatory Skin Disease Monitoring

Eczema (also called atopic dermatitis, AD) is a chronic condition that affects up to 20% of children and 10% of adults, and can cause chronic discomfort, pain and psychosocial challenges. The patient experience of those seeking treatment for eczema comprises a cycle of visual assessment and increasing potency (and cost) of medications where a pharmacist, then GP, then dermatologist test various first to fifth-line therapy options. A lack of objective measures of eczema condition means that each stage of treatment requires visual skin assessment which risks misdiagnosis, and for dermatologists often means long waiting times. Addressing both challenges, our goal is to introduce an objective measurement device to clinical (and non-clinical) environments where data-driven treatment can improve patient pathways. From a treatment perspective, increased diagnostic certainty can allow increased precision (and decreased time) therapeutic cycles with more accurate measurements of tissue condition also helping to understand who may respond best to a particular treatment. Our technology that we are seeking to progress is a vibroacoustic sensor which measures the material properties of skin’s layers using small vibrations on the surface of the skin. Crucially, our innovation is the ability to measure the elasticity (stiffness) and viscoelasticity (fluid content) of the epidermis, dermis and hypodermis of the skin (its key constituent layers) at high resolution from the surface of the skin (i.e. non-invasively). Our acoustic technology also avoids the biases that can be common in optical or visual methods of skin assessment of darker skin as the acoustic properties are pigment independent. For inflammatory skin disease and eczema in particular, we have been developing our sensors to measure epidermal and dermal changes as indicators of skin condition. Whilst we have early assessment of a single eczema sufferer, our current gap is that we lack sufficient feasibility data that would justify larger scale investment in a clinical trial. Within this project we plan to test whether there are correlates between expert dermatologist skin assessment and the material metrics from our sensors. A strong correlation would indicate the potential for dermatologist-quality measures to be taken outside of a specialist centre thereby allowing treatment tracking, community treatment assessments and diagnostic confirmations. Our tests for this will be on up to ten patients who are undergoing third/fourth-line treatments for moderate eczema, over a period of 10 weeks. This will address the gap of clinical feasibility data be helping us to understand (1) if the measurements provide beneficial and appropriate data for clinicians to help understand treatment response; (2) what perspectives are of patients having measurements taken; and (3) what methods are clinically acceptable. Gathering this data will position us to justify larger scale investment in clinical trials of our technology.