The advancements in continuous glucose monitoring (CGM)- non-adjunctive use and zero calibrations- have been transformative in the life of patients with diabetes. Latest sensor technology and algorithms have resulted in sub-ten Mean Average Relative Differences (MARDs). However, there are some physiology related discrepancies that have been difficult to crack. Complexity of immune responses, foreign body responses, patient to patient differences, patch adhesion are a few causes of inaccuracies especially during early and late wear periods in CGMs. Drug eluting sensors, multi-sensing elements, self-learning algorithms are some of the potential solutions to these faults.

From the inception of “Digital Health” over a decade ago, the connected-care and Digital Diagnostics showed immense promise in coupling static EHR data, existing devices and therapeutics with daily dynamic data captured from the body. But the industry quickly learned that R&D and product build could not overcome necessary efficacy and safety requirements in sufficient time to live up to the hype for medical use, while technology focused on consumer use instead. After nearly ten years, there are specific technologies, products, and therapeutic areas that have emerged from this challenging phase of R&D, proving their value clinically and improving patient lives from the comfort of their own home

Today’s non-invasive electronic health patches perform conventional measures like heart activity and body motion, while the medical field awaits continuous wearable sensing of chemical information like that found in blood draws.  All this is now rapidly changing as sweat biosensing is targeting a first killer application in medication monitoring, enabling precision dosing through non-invasive, direct measurement of individual drug response.

Being cutting edge can mean being beyond initial applicability. We’ll have an honest discussion about FocusMotion’s inception to market fit failure to market fit success after leaving its initial thesis behind and embracing healthcare opportunities and a more vertical approach – learnings include: prototyping, data collection, patient-centered design, and endurance.

Patient outcomes and standardization of care continue to benefit from smarter and sensor-enabled medical devices that provide real-time patient monitoring and device performance data. The challenge is selecting the right sensor, including deciding between consumer or clinical-grade sensors. This panel will evaluate the trade offs between these two sensor classes as the panelists tackle this dilemma.

The cost of sub-optimal pharmacotherapy is immense, both in terms of human lives lost (125,000 annually in US) and financial burden on healthcare systems (over $500 billion in US alone).  Poor patient adherence to prescriptions drive a significant portion of that expense but current approaches taken to control costs have been ineffective or, worse, counter-productive.  For certain diseases, access to life-saving medication is restricted in certain patient populations based on the uninformed assumption that those people will be unable to adhere to a particular drug regimen.  Such sweeping, ineffective policies can be eliminated by surfacing the information necessary to correctly identify patients that are struggling with adherence and provide them with the support they need to stay on therapy.  The Proteus digital-medicine platform integrates medication with hardware, software, analytics and services to deliver that exact information and has had significant impact in every disease area it has been applied to.  In this talk, Jeremy will provide insights into this digital-medicines category and associated pipeline of products in development and commercialization.

Inflammation is at the root of a lot of digestive diseases like Ulcerative Colitis, Crohn’s Disease, Barrett’s Esophagus, Gastroenteritis and more. With today’s tools, gastroenterologists are limited in diagnosing the progression of inflammation beyond visual observations which are very subjective to interpretation. Blood tests and pathologies take time. The desire to quantify inflammation objectively during an examination could mean improved patient outcomes and procedures. We have been researching a variety of sensing technologies that show promise in quantifying inflammation. This talk will focus on in vivo perfusion sensing for inflammatory bowel diseases and how it can help stricture management.  

Globally metabolic health is dropping at an alarming rate. The human gastro-intestinal system is a very complex system and actually rather accessible, certainly considering recent technological advances in sensing and miniaturization. This talk will focus on technological innovations needed to provide a holistic view of the human GI system in the form of ingestibles or minimally invasive insertables.