Devices & Hardware News

New for Remote Patient Monitoring Programs: An mHealth Toilet Seat

A New York-based startup is seeking FDA approval for a sensor-embedded toilet seat designed to enable remote monitoring of people with congestive heart failure. The mHealth, er, platform tracks biometric data whenever someone sits down on the toilet.

Source: ThinkStock

By Eric Wicklund

- The latest idea in mHealth innovation aims to improve remote patient monitoring for people with cardiac issues through the bathroom.

Researchers at New York’s Rochester Institute of Technology are working on a sensor-embedded toilet seat that would enable care providers to monitor a patient’s weight, heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygenation levels and stroke volume (the amount of blood pumped through each heartbeat).

“This cardiovascular monitoring system is designed to detect deterioration early, while bypassing the need for patient adherence, by using a unique form factor: a toilet seat,” Nicholas Conn, founder and CEO of Heart Health Intelligence, told Digital Trends last month. “The seat is directly enabled by advanced proprietary algorithms, and captures over nine clinically relevant measurements. It incorporates a single-lead electrocardiogram for measuring the electrical activity of the heart, a photoplethysmogram for measuring blood oxygenation and localized pulse timing, a ballistocardiogram for measuring the mechanical forces associated with the cardiac cycle, and a body weight sensor.”

Studies indicate one-quarter of congestive heart failure patients discharged from a hospital are readmitted within 30 days, and that number jumps to 45 percent by 90 days. While hospitals and health systems are being penalized for those readmissions, they’re also finding that many readmissions could be prevented – and clinical outcomes could be improved – through a remote monitoring program.

Heart Health Intelligence, which won a Tiger Tank competition last year, tested the smart toilet set on 18 patients over an eight-week period in late 2018, and found that the connected health device “successfully demonstrated … blood pressure, stroke volume and blood oxygenation accuracy consistent with gold standard measures.” The study was recently published in JMIR mHealth and uHealth.

“There is a pressing need to reduce the hospitalization rate of heart failure patients to limit rising health care costs and improve outcomes,” the study, penned by Conn and colleagues at RIT, reported. “Tracking physiologic changes to detect early deterioration in the home has the potential to reduce hospitalization rates through early intervention. However, classical approaches to in-home monitoring have had limited success, with patient adherence cited as a major barrier. This work presents a toilet seat–based cardiovascular monitoring system that has the potential to address low patient adherence as it does not require any change in habit or behavior.”

The mobile health, er, platform is part of a growing number of sensor-enabled products designed for home health use, giving care providers and their patients a means of monitoring vital signs and other information outside the doctor’s office.

The toilet set holds promise not only for those with cardiac problems who need better care management at home, but also for a wide range of chronic care patients as well as seniors who want to live at home.

In a recent press release announcing the company’s plans to seek approval from the US Food and Drug Administration, Conn noted that a hospital seeing 150 readmissions of CHF patients in one year stands to lose at least $500,000 in reimbursement, while an RPM program for those same 150 patients would cost the hospital about $200,000.

Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
©2012-2024 TechTarget, Inc. Xtelligent Healthcare Media is a division of TechTarget. All rights reserved. HealthITAnalytics.com is published by Xtelligent Healthcare Media a division of TechTarget.