We have recently commenced a new study, led at Nottingham University Hospital NHS Trust by Dr Matthew Martin, to monitor around 300 people from different hospitals with COPD for a period of 3 months after they are discharged from the hospital using a smartphone app and a Fitbit device to try to develop a way to detect COPD decline in advance of their occurrence.
The study is sponsored by Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and funded by Huma Therapeutics Limited
Physiological and environmental data in a remote setting to predict exacerbation events in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: an observational study (SENSOR)
Introduction
Roughly 1.2 million people in the UK are living with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). In the more serious stages of the disease, COPD progresses through a series of exacerbations that can be frightening for the person living with COPD and often results in a medical emergency, requiring hospitalisation. Each time they occur, they may leave behind permanent, irreversible lung damage; so it’s important to learn how to better avoid them occurring in the first place. Most of what we have learnt and measured about COPD has been in the clinical setting. However, new methods of data collection, enabled by digital technologies, allow doctors and scientists to understand how medical conditions like COPD progress and affect the lives of the people living with them outside of the hospital, at a level of detail far closer to that found within the hospital.
We plan to monitor around 300 people from different hospitals with COPD for a period of 3 months after they are discharged from the hospital using a smartphone app and a Fitbit device. This device can passively track certain health metrics such as your vital signs and symptoms, which allows the study to assess whether it is possible to identify the early warning signs of a decline in your health, through these ongoing measurements.. Improving our understanding of how this information can be utilised, could enable doctors to potentially intervene earlier, to reduce health deterioration and prevent hospital admissions in patients with COPD. It is important to understand that as this study is simply collecting data, to aid the development of software that can interpret these signals, that you will not benefit from live monitoring from the research team as part of this study.
We also seek to investigate how similar these physiological measurements are when collected in the real world rather than just in the hospital setting, and what influence environmental factors have on a patient’s health and experience of their condition.