A partnership between UK health company Living With, the Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust (RUH), and the University of Bath has nabbed a major grant to develop a Rheumatoid Arthritis Flare Profiler.
Innovate UK is funding the project which should allow rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients to use new methods capturing key disease activity data using a smartphone.
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The idea is that data will allow doctors to better understand their condition and come up with smarter ways to treat it.
We’re thrilled to have won an Innovate UK grant… This will transform the way patients with rheumatoid arthritis can be monitored intelligently between appointments and hopefully help the NHS reduce the cost of treating patients with RA. It also adds a transformational new capability to our existing Living With Rheumatoid Arthritis product. Living With’s CEO Chris Robson
The scheme will be trialled out of the RUH Trust’s Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases (RNHRD) which is a world leader in rheumatic conditions.
Living With is teaming up with the Centre for the Analysis of Motion, Entertainment Research and Applications, also know as CAMERA, at the University of Bath.
CAMERA has developed and evaluated other new digital tech such as the use of video, sound and motion for clinical applications. The centre was specifically created to further and transfer the knowledge developed within computer science and aims to target technology developed for the entertainment industries, to other sectors such as healthcare
This is a great project. Being able to take some of the computer vision techniques we developed for hand tracking for animation and transferring them into a condition monitoring platform that can operate in a person’s home is a very positive use of technology and exactly the kind of work we should all be doing CAMERA Director, Professor Darren Cosker
What is a Flare Profiler?
The actual ‘Flare Profiler’ will be designed to test a unique range of patient data sources including video and thermal imaging technology.
The idea is that the project will then analyse patient data using cutting edge artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning technology. This will allow the app group the patient disease activity patterns so it can identify the most effective treatment pathways for them.
The team hope that the Flare Profiler will demonstrate how better monitoring can provide earlier detection of issues.
Hopefully, the new tech will allow earlier treatments and reduce the need for costly acute treatment while also reducing the stress and need for patients to travel to a hospital during treatment for specialist tests.
Find out more or sign up to take part at livingwith.health
Or follow along for future papers and research at researchportal.bath.ac.uk
