While hardly a new innovation, remote health monitoring is gaining traction in this digital age.
Thanks to advances in medical technology and the widespread availability of wireless internet, ideas that were once science fiction, like continuous glucose monitors for diabetics that enable physicians to keep track of their patients’ well-being remotely, are now commonplace.
And in parallel to the related field of virtual healthcare, new monitoring technologies are helping to reduce the need for hospital visits and give medical professionals greater insight into their patients’ conditions.
In a sign that innovation in the space still has much to give, startups developing remote patient monitoring tools have emerged as a key driver of medical technology investment in the past year. And while some of the biggest funding rounds have gone to U.S. firms like Blue Spark, European researchers like the Glasgow-based startup Pneumowave aren’t far behind.
The U.K.-based HealthTech firm is developing a respiratory monitoring device and platform that it hopes will be able to prevent deaths and reduce hospital admissions by capturing and analyzing physiological signals in real time.
And while the company is still in research and development mode, it has said it will use capital from a £7.5 million Series A funding round announced on Thursday (Jan. 12) to accelerate clinical validation and obtain the necessary regulatory approvals for a future product launch.
Of course, for many conditions, self-monitoring is also an important aspect of treatment. But in a system based on physical hospital appointments, even if a patient is regularly taking their own blood pressure, measuring their heart rate, or performing some other form of home medical test, they often lack an avenue for communicating data with their care team.
Another European startup looking to solve this problem is Doccla, which has developed a platform that works as a “virtual ward,” in which patients input their vital signs, allowing doctors to access their condition remotely.
The company’s solution consists of a wearable devicethat measures among other things a patient’s heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature and blood pressure, as well as a pre-configured smartphone for data entry.
Having already signed key contracts with the U.K.’s national health service NHS trusts, the company said in September that it will use the proceeds of a £15 million Series A to expand into other European markets.
Maximizing Potential of Monitoring Devices
Like Doccla, other MedTechs are recognizing that devices alone aren’t sufficient and need to be complemented with software to fully maximize the potential of remote monitoring.
An example is Implicity, a Paris-based startup that raised one of the biggest funding rounds in the space last year by means of a $23 million Series A. Rather than developing its own monitoring devices, the French firm is developing a cloud-based platform and suit of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions that improve the effectiveness of Implantable Loop Recorders (ILRs) — a type of heart monitoring device that cardiologists use to monitor and assess their patients.
While HealthTech has made important medical advancements, a fragmented market has left medical professionals struggling with different software platforms, dulling the technology’s potential as a remote monitoring tool.
To solve this problem, Implicity has developed an AI-powered device-agnostic cardiovascular monitoring platform that allows physicians to collect data from different ILRs and deploy a range of AI tools to help with diagnostics, rehabilitation and ongoing measurement.
