Telehealth Innovation – Connecting Patients to their Carers

    The Challenge

    Changing demographics and an ageing population is putting an increasing burden on the NHS, risking its ability to provide care free at the point of access.

    Does technology have a solution to this problem? Can management of health be transformed by widespread deployment of low cost integrated medical devices capable of collecting basic patient physiological data and transferring it to cloud-based centres for analysis?

    MonitorMe was conceived as a novel vital-signs monitoring telephone, simple to use but capable of providing rich information to healthcare providers and carers.

    Connecting Patients to their Carers
    Connecting Patients to their Carers

    The Approach

    The telephone handset is equipped with sensors to capture vital physiological signs and send them via telephone lines to a digital patient record, which could be analysed by a medical professional if significant changes were identified.

    Plextek scientists thoroughly investigated the system requirements and created a whole-system simulation to understand the limitations of the system and test our intended solution.

    We worked closely with the company throughout the development process, integrating four vital-signs sensors into a robust telehealth device capable of providing accurate information to a back-end patient database.

    The Outcome

    The delivered MonitorMe phone fully supported full-duplex DTMF signalling to a local telehealth server emulator. In order to interface with the public network the existing DTMF tones were matched to the connected network characteristics to protect the phone and user.

    The Plextek team developed and delivered a solution that utilised appropriate design principles to allow eventual CE certification of the final product.

    Completion of the development programme for this advanced prototype enabled our client to begin usability trials with hospitals in Leeds and Newcastle in order to acquire a CE mark and bring the product to market.

    lady using MonitorMe