Bridging the connectivity gap to help carers care

Darren Crombie, CEO and founder of Upstream Health writes about how in-home data is transforming the way carers care.

There are approximately 2 million elderly people who currently receive social care in their home in the UK and more than 250 million globally. Social care services are already stretched and with the COVID-19 pandemic it’s even harder with an increase in isolation and loneliness due to shielding. New ways to communicate, support, and assist this key group are seen as key to providing sustainable and viable services at the point of need.

Three years ago, we set about on a mission to build a preventative solution that looks into the future needs of the vulnerable who receive treatment at home, we wanted to identify the actions needed today that will help them stay well tomorrow. In short, we wanted to predict the future. Clearly, the longer people can remain healthier and happier in their own home the less strain there is on hospital infrastructure. If you can streamline care in the community through big data, the benefits are enormous.

With the clear benefits of treating patients at home whenever possible, the challenge arises when developing a solution which specifically targets the elderly cohort. Typically, they are ‘offline’, they aren’t technology savvy, they don’t use smart devices and the technology can be perceived as an unacceptable intrusion. Connectivity as well as the device interface are the two critical elements for a successful implementation. If the device can be literally taken out of a box and its connected, if it can work automatically to remotely collect and securely transmit numerous data points and if the device interface can simply prompt and check with patients how they are and if they need any help (with shopping or prescriptions etc) then the benefits are clear.

A WiFi connected and multi sensor solution has too many variables of error to be considered viable for a quick, simple deployment. In some regions over 50% of our elderly community don’t even have an internet connection, and most of the community want to be supported not watched.

The key to success would be an easy to install and low-cost monitoring solution, which was non-intrusive, and which could identify ‘need’ insights about the patients in real-time.

We then looked at IoT based solutions as they seemed to offer the out-of-the-box solution we were looking for. We initially focused on LoRa to piggyback onto the many initiatives being rolled out for LoRaWAN across UK cities. However, the team quickly realised that the upload and download transmission intervals wouldn’t be suitable, and the patchy coverage would limit their ability to deploy at scale. So, we turned our attention to an IoT GSM based solution, and partnered with u-blox Thingstream.

The u-blox Thingstream service offers a single secure, global GSM SIM (it works in over 190 countries worldwide and on hundreds of mobile networks) and it also permits bidirectional data flow, all with a fixed price data package.

With the connectivity issue solved we are rolling out our Bridgit Home Support Hub which works out-of-the-box and is simply attached to the patient’s fridge. With more than nine sensors it can measure more than 40 data points (including temperature, movement, fridge access, HR, SPO2, GPS and many more), with the ability to connect lots of additional external sensors through its BLE hot spot. This real-time data is relayed back to the family carer via an app. Push notifications can be sent to the Bridgit device by the family carer to check on the patient’s wellbeing and with AI analytics identifying patterns (care intelligence) of normal/abnormal behaviour ensure predictive care interventions can be made.