What have biomedical sensors taught you about patients?

Biomedical sensors that help track patient health have taught us a lot about biological milestones, but they've also taught Lionel Tarassenko, PhD, professor of electrical engineering at University of Oxford, a lot about patient psychology.

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It was a reminder sitting there on the table in their dining room that they had this chronic disease for the rest of their lives.

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And also, when their friends came around to play bridge with them, it advertised the fact to all of their friends that they had this chronic illness.

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Probably, what I've learned most about in the last 10 years through the wireless health or mHealth work that I've been involved in is actually patient psychology.

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Now, one of the things that we've learned, and this wasn't my research, I was just on an advisory board on a big telehealth project in the UK,

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where a well known manufacturer of telehealth technology gave patients a box to manage their, in this case,

00:47

COPD in their homes. And the patients absolutely hated, a lot of them did, having this box, for two reasons.

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It was a reminder sitting there on the table in their dining room that they had this chronic disease for the rest of their lives.

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And also, when their friends came around to play bridge with them, it advertised the fact to all of their friends that they had this chronic illness.

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So they didn't want to use the box. The box literally sometimes ended being thrown out of the window. So what we've done instead is we gave

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these elderly folk, et cetera, we give them an iPad. And we say, look, you can look at your grandkids' pictures. You can do all sorts of things.

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With this, we make it very simple to use, and it's a health care app on it. And they're happy to do that because they're using the same technology as their children,

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as their grandkids. It makes them feel good. It's not just a box that they've been given because they're elderly and they've got this disease.

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That, they just do not want, but something where they can do all sorts of things that are totally right for them in terms

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of, as I say, looking at pictures, but also spending 30 seconds, 1 minute doing this patient diary, this one measurement.

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That kind of works, because they actually like using that technology. And a lot of them said to us, why have you not