The emergence of connected homecare

WeHealth by Servi­er, Servi­er Group’s Dig­i­tal Health busi­ness unit, and the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy (MIT), announced today a col­lab­o­ra­tion agree­ment to define new mar­ket par­a­digms of home technologies.

WeHealth and the Age­Lab will inter­act togeth­er through the Age­Lab C3 Con­nect­ed Home Logis­tics Con­sor­tium, along with oth­er indus­try lead­ers, to con­duct col­lab­o­ra­tive research to envi­sion the devel­op­ment of home ser­vices to tack­le the grow­ing chal­lenge of con­nec­tiv­i­ty, con­ve­nience and care to improve indi­vid­ual health and well-being in elder­ly people.

“This part­ner­ship is an unprece­dent­ed oppor­tu­ni­ty to syn­er­gize our forces for advanc­ing health­care” said Dr. David Guez, Gen­er­al Direc­tor of WeHealth by Servi­er. “This fol­lows our open inno­va­tion approach, which we firm­ly believe is an effi­cient way to accel­er­ate the devel­op­ment and com­mer­cial­iza­tion of solu­tions that will ben­e­fit patients and health­care professionals.”

Through its research, which aims to under­stand the impact of glob­al demo­graph­ic change on con­sumer behav­ior, Age­Lab MIT believes that tomorrow’s home will no longer sim­ply be a place to live, but will become a plat­form of ser­vices and expe­ri­ences pro­vid­ed by an inter­con­nect­ed ecosys­tem of technologies.

“Recent efforts to address chal­lenges brought by the aging of the pop­u­la­tion have looked at tech­nol­o­gy as a pos­si­ble solu­tion”, said Dr. Joseph Cough­lin, Prin­ci­pal inves­ti­ga­tor of the C3 Con­sor­tium Pro­gram. “The intro­duc­tion of ambi­ent intel­li­gence through­out the time, empow­ered by machine learn­ing algo­rithms, is espe­cial­ly well posi­tioned to moti­vate healthy behav­ior and proac­tive­ly reduce the prob­a­bil­i­ty of cat­a­stroph­ic event such as missed dos­es of med­ica­tion and falls”.

In a con­text of increas­ing chron­ic dis­eases and an aging pop­u­la­tion, the devel­op­ment of home health care is a sig­nif­i­cant issue. E‑Health makes it pos­si­ble to pro­vide inno­v­a­tive and effec­tive solu­tions that meet the evolv­ing needs of patients. It facil­i­tates patient‘s dis­tance care and assis­tance and care path­way in terms of pre­ven­tion, com­pli­ance and home­care services.

E‑Health also reflects a change in the behav­ior of patients who are increas­ing­ly involved in their health and treat­ment plans by being bet­ter informed — via spe­cial­ized web­sites and mobile health — and bet­ter self/ remote­ly mon­i­tored, thanks to the emer­gence on the mar­ket of con­nect­ed devices (i.e. glu­cose meter, portable ECG, treat­ment reminders, sen­sors) and afford­able home diag­nos­tics tests.

Data ana­lyt­ics is the com­mon denom­i­na­tor to all dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies. The solu­tions designed as part of the part­ner­ship between WeHealth by Servi­er and Age­Lab MIT will meet with new health needs and require­ments in a secured man­ner to pro­tect and respect patient con­fi­den­tial­i­ty. The inno­va­tions will also ensure data inter­op­er­abil­i­ty between the dif­fer­ent solu­tions on the mar­ket and broad­er health data (i.e. Elec­tron­ic Med­ical Records), ulti­mate­ly break­ing down siloes of data while improv­ing access data by patients and health­care professionals.