Home help?

Doctors, say the hospitals, must shoulder more of the burden. More patients should be treated at GP level rather than scurrying to A&E. Doctors meanwhile have only so many hours in the day and their limited resources are also at breaking point. Patients, say the Doctors, must shoulder more of the burden. So we end up with the health service seeing potential savings by having certain treatment and diagnosis, but most particularly monitoring, farmed out to the patient in their own homes or workplaces. Wearable electronics, for example, could play an important role as could cheap, portable and easy to use instruments. Of the many potential ailments that could benefit from home monitoring, one is the ear infection. Ear infections are the most common reason for children to see a doctor. They account for six million consultations in the UK every year, with 90% of children suffering from an ear infection before the age of six and 50% of these recurring. Visits to the doctor are often inconvenient for parents, especially those who work, and cause children to miss school. The Challenge We are looking for a device that can be easily used by parents to provide the necessary information to Doctors to allow them to offer advice remotely. There needs to be a reliable quantity and quality of information if the Doctor is to be able give appropriate advice that both Doctor and patient (or patient's parents) are satisfied with. A low res and distant picture of a sore ear, for example, is not likely to give the Doctor much help. The device needs to be medically safe to use so that any ailments are not worsened if it is used carelessly and it must be able to be reused. The doctor may advise continued vigilance or maybe able to offer a course of antibiotics – either way continued monitoring and communication of those results will be imperative, hence the need for reuse. Even better would be if the device was not restricted to monitoring ear infections and could be used for domestic monitoring of all sorts of parameters in a sufficiently reliable way. Again the key is going to be providing information of the right quality. In our litigious society, if Doctors had any doubt they would ask all patients to come into the surgery as only good quality information will keep patients away and make this device have true value. Any ideas that you would like to share with us? Feel free to tell us below. -Solution- Solution to the December 2014 Coffee Time Challenge Last month we asked you to come up with device that would allow parents to monitor ear infections in their infants without having to repeatedly go to the doctor. The solution we had in mind came from Cupris Health, whose product, Cupris, it dubs as the 'the doctor in your pocket'. Cupris is a smartphone based service that makes remote healthcare consultations from home possible. It is essentially a frame that goes round a smartphone, similar to the a standard phone protector, with a fitting placed over the appropriate phone sensor, typically the camera, to which the instrument can be attached. There are two instruments currently available – the otoscope to solve the problem we presented with ear infections, and an ophthalmoscope for eye examinations. The service is a hardware and software solution, so information about symptoms can be added to the photos and be sent, securely, to doctor or hospital. Different phones have different camera and flash positions so a frame is required for each model, but the instruments are standard. Light is provided by the cameras flash. Cupris intend to develop further instruments in due course.