Post-COVID there has been a huge increase in demand for respiratory care devices to meet the demands of clinical establishments with many new players coming to market with solutions, but the progression beyond that has been to make devices that are lightweight, portable and suitable for residential use, with the commercial constraints of being cost-effective in a cluttered space with many disposable component parts.
With the opening of the design book, new technologies have had the chance to be incorporated and to integrate features into the devices that may not have been needed before. To capture all the data for analysis, if a patient is breathing through a mask, their inspiration and expiration volumes can be monitored by tracking the differential pressure changes of the patient’s breath. Since the patient’s breathing is captured as “data”, this can be configured to trigger an alarm on unexpected changes, or to present a captured breathing profile during a clinical exam.
If health indicators can truly be captured and viewed as data, it is not limited to respiratory care, as similar principles and advancements are being made across the industry as the level of confidence in the technology is improving. Capturing deviations or changes can be as accurate as 60 mbar, so this methodology can lend itself to extended areas such as blood pressure analysis, heart rate monitoring, brain impulses for diagnosis epilepsy and accelerating wound recovery by negative pressure therapy.
The improvement in technology goes beyond the biometric data a patient will generate, but it can be seen in advancements in how care is delivered. Data generated by a patient may be the “output”, but what about the “input”? When additional care needs to be delivered, this can also be connected via IoT systems and be integrated with the symptoms presented by the patient.
Advancements in medical technology will undoubtedly require multiple disciplines to provide a robust solution in such a tightly regulated field. No unnecessary risks can be taken and an MTBF rate could be the difference between life and death. The decision to develop a new offering in the medical market can be daunting considering the time, effort and expense that would be required to meet guidelines in a high cost of failure environment.
Even from example to breathing apparatus with IoT connectivity, you need a range of disciplines, either your own team or specialist contractors. It needs electrical and electronic engineering for operation and data collection, software developers for data connectivity and control settings, mechanical engineering for airflow, and most importantly, a medical input to ensure that the product is fit for purpose and can work effectively to support the patient.
These activities can be considered overhead prohibitive as it goes beyond normal working practices to find new effective and sustainable solutions. As a means of supporting innovation in the UK, where the development took place, HMRC is helping to soften the blow of this expense.
Where development has been applied, there are mechanisms available through tax refunds to recover some of the expenditure. This can apply to expenses from the start of the pre-planning phase through to release and implementation to cover a portion of team salaries, consumables, cost of prototyping, and cost of inputs specialized subcontractors that may have been necessary to give you the required levels of performance.
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