Right time, right place, right advice: AI-enabled medication reminder for in-home heart monitor

该公司主要产品背后的催化剂是2015年与一位心脏移植外科医生的一次谈话，那次谈话引发了一个简单的问题：“你知道吗，如果我做过手术的人中有一半人及时报告了症状，他们根本不需要手术。”进一步的研究使衷心的创始人发现了“非依从”患者的隐藏问题。这些人大多是独居的老年人，许多人的心智能力正在恶化，无法听从医生给他们的建议。当他们的症状变得更糟时，他们不是寻求帮助，而是最终被紧急送往医院。全球有超过6000万人患有心力衰竭，这是一种晚期疾病，其存活率比大多数癌症都要低。治疗这些疾病的费用相当可观，仅在英国每年就大约有17亿英镑，其中大部分都花在了昂贵且通常可以预防的医院治疗上。衷心的愿景是通过一种自动监测装置来解决这个问题，这种装置可以放在病人家里，测量脚量的变化——心脏问题的一个关键指标——并触发警报，从而及时进行医疗干预。它有可能改善数百万心脏病患者的生活质量，也可以节省NHS的资金，并通过腾出医院床位减少在急诊室的等待时间。衷心的监护仪是全自动的，不需要与病人互动。脚量数据被上传到云端，并使用人工智能进行分析，人工智能会监视关键变化。这是一项复杂的尖端技术，受专利保护，但使用起来非常简单。在英国对数百名患者进行的试点试验证明了它的有效性。通过让我们的患者和他们的护理人员广泛参与产品开发讨论，我们发现，他们中的很多人都愿意接受设备本身在他们的足量增加时提供提醒的想法。这就是艾奥娜的想法诞生的过程。该项目的主要目的是开发这种“类似alexa”的功能Aiona，当患者的脚量趋势在主要的衷心设备上发出警报时，它会提醒患者服用药物。这将触发对患者护理团队的通知，后者可以查看数据并决定是否可以发送药物提示。不像每天的药物提醒，患者在几周内就会对提醒视而不见，当他们的症状恶化时，偶尔的提醒可能更有效。

The catalyst behind the company's main product was a conversation with a heart transplant surgeon in 2015 that prompted a simple question: 'Do you know, that half the people I operate on wouldn't require surgery at all if they had reported their symptoms in time?'.Further research enabled the Heartfelt founders to unearth the hidden problem of "non-adherent' patients. These are mostly elderly people, often living alone, many with deteriorating mental capacity, who are unable to follow the advice given to them by their doctors. Instead of calling for help as their symptoms get worse, they end up as emergency hospital admissions.There are over 60M people globally with heart failure - a terminal illness with worse survival statistics than most cancers. The cost of treating them is substantial, roughly £1.7billion/year in the UK alone, most of which is spent delivering expensive and often preventable hospital treatments.Heartfelt's vision is to address this problem with an autonomous-monitoring-device that sits in the patient's home, measuring changes in foot-volume -- a key indicator of heart problems -- and triggering alerts and thus timely medical intervention. It has the potential to improve the life quality of millions of heart patients, and also to save the NHS money and reduce waiting time in A&E by freeing up hospital-beds.Heartfelt's monitor is fully automatic and requires no interaction with the patient. The foot-volume data is uploaded to the cloud and analysed using artificial intelligence, which watches for critical changes. It is complicated, cutting-edge technology, protected by patent but utterly simple to use. Pilot trials on hundreds of patients in the UK have demonstrated its effectiveness.By engaging a wide range of our patients and their carers in product development discussions, we found that a significant number of them would be open to the idea of the device itself providing reminders if their foot volume was increasing. That is how the idea for Aiona was born.The main aim of the project is to develop this "Alexa-like" feature, Aiona, to remind patients to take their medications when their foot volume trend raises alert on the main Heartfelt device. This would trigger a notification to the patient's care team who can review the data and decide if a medication prompt can be sent.Unlike daily medication-reminders, which patients become reminder-blind to within weeks, an occasional reminder when their symptoms are worsening is likely to be more effective.