SensNews May 2016

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7 Sensor100 May 2016
The Sphere House Continued...
The project appears to be significantly different from other home health
monitoring projects which tend to focus on long term chronic health
conditions such as COPD, diabetes, and heart failure. The intention of
these projects is to monitor patients in the home, and provide data to the
patients themselves and their healthcare providers. A study by the Scripps
Translational Science Institute ) has found no short-
term benefit in health costs or outcomes for patients who monitored
their health with connected devices. “It was a bit disappointing, but re-
member, this was the first multisensor trial that’s ever been reported, so in
that respect it was a pioneering effort,” study author and STSI Director Dr.
Eric Topol said.“And you know, it was very difficult because we had these
three different sensors, glucose, blood pressure, and heart rhythm, and a
lot of patients had all three problems or two of them, and had to have a
dashboard created.There are a lot of logistical challenges there.”
In contrast, the Sphere Project seems to be designed to collect and ratio-
nalise behavioral data, with the intention of helping the medical community
better understand how certain conditions progress over time. The chal-
lenge would seem to be in developing algorithms which allow relevant
information to be mined. Behavioral changes which indicate progression
of degenerative diseases happen slowly over periods of years. Whether it
is advantageous to monitor behavior for years vs. more direct diagnosis via
biosensors remains to be seen.
Read more...
IEEE newsletter “The SPHERE House Can Monitor Its Resi-
dents’ Health”