Breathing easier: The add-on to help manage respiratory conditions

Ian Bolland spoke to David van Sickle, co-founder and CEO of Propeller Health – a company dedicated to the management of chronic respiratory disease. 

The company was founded with the aim of making respiratory diseases easier for patients to manage conditions such as COPD and asthma. Van Sickle previously had an academic career studying the conditions in different areas around the world, including working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. 

Acting as a medication adherence intervention, van Sickle explains how it works, saying: “We essentially created a piece of hardware that connects the existing inhalers to the networks so we can passively monitor the use of those daily medicines and identify when people aren’t using them, or when they have and encourage them to use their medication more regularly.

“Because there’s a sensor on them we’re understanding when they’ve taken it on time or missed a dose and we can remind them to come back around on that morning medicine or evening medicine. Then there’s the sensor that goes on the medicine that’s used as needed – the rescue medicine – and that’s essentially giving us this vital sign of whether they’re doing well or not. Ideally, we never hear from that, we don’t want people to have symptoms and they shouldn’t be having symptoms very often.

“We’re able to essentially identify people who aren’t doing well and need help controlling the disease and bring those people to the attention of their physician, as well as giving themselves feedback in an app that they need to be doing more to avoid or mitigate exposure that are causing symptoms – or they need to be sticking more regularly with that daily medicine, or that there’s something else going on that needs to be investigated.” 

The sensors are battery operated portable Bluetooth devices designed to last around 18 months. A challenge for the company in terms of the design of the sensor, was to figure out a common architecture with multiple different mechanical embodiments. 

“What we use is a variety of different types of sensors whether it’s pressure sensors, capacitive touch, acoustic monitoring, etc. It’s all designed to essentially passively, but accurately, identify when somebody has picked up and is using that medicine. So, we make these small, little attachments that go onto a person’s existing medication.”

The active social life of medication devices, such as inhalers, and its active social life means it has to be low cost and robust, and remain easy for a patient to use. The development of the sensor is done in-house – with Propeller’s hardware team covering everything from prototyping, manufacturing, supply chain management and regulatory aspects. In sum, Van Sickle views Propeller as a hardware-enabled software business.

“We have to essentially to build those pieces of hardware because we want that data to exist and it’s really in the software life that the value of that data is created. The hardware has to be built so we can bring those data to life, essentially.”

Towards the end of 2020, the company struck and agreement with Novartis – a partnership which co-packages Propeller’s sensor with a new medicine for uncontrolled asthma in the EU – which provides a new way for Propeller to gets its product into the hands of more patients. 

Van Sickle sees it as a way of distributing digital health to more people in a cost-effective way. The digital health, sensors and electronics elements of medtech is something he sees as becoming increasingly intertwined. 

“When we started back in 2010 it wasn’t common for people to have wearables or to have things like Fitbits. Even smartphones weren’t nearly as popular as they are now. I’d highlight a couple of things. One is the social dynamics. People have become a lot more used to devices that are tracking things like health and activity and wellness. There’s just been a general trend for people to monitor their own health and wellbeing through things like watches and other kinds of wearable devices.”

Future plans for the company include an increased presence in the UK.

“We’re working on a couple of programmes to bring Propeller to different parts of the NHS and we’re really excited about what that will mean with people and severe asthma and so forth.”