Patent granted for cardiovascular monitoring watch

The European Patent Office has granted Aseptika a patent for its medical-grade wearable, for use by patients with severe cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.

Aseptika and Renfrew Group International (RGi) worked together on the design and prototyping of the Activ8rlives BuddyWotch. This solution will provide "expert" pathways for use by patient, carers and the healthcare team to inform, manage and report the success of self-care plans. It aims to help patients remain independent at home, with a better quality and more sustainable model of care.

BuddyWotch will continuously monitor, record and transmit the patient's physiological signs of blood oxygen, heart rate, breathing rate and temperature for 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week. With its integrated nine-axis accelerometer, BuddyWotch tracks the patient's physiological signs and how these change over time as the patient goes about daily life.

As well as acting as an alert in case of medical emergencies, this information is used to continuously calculate the patient's overall health and to detect whether the wearer's health is getting better or is declining rapidly. It can be used to test the patient in a GP clinic using the six-minute walk test.

The BuddyWotch platform connects directly to the Company's Activ8rlives Cloud (or can be pointed to a partner's cloud system). Activ8rlives has portals for the patient, for family members caring for them and for clinicians, providing continuous monitoring and alerts as well as the index of tolerance to exercise, itself perhaps a better indication of overall health than simple alerts usually associated with remote monitoring systems.

The BuddyWotch transmits information to-and-from the wearer using an integrated 4G modem and WiFi, so that no separate home hub or smartphone is required by the user.

Monitoring the most "at risk" patients can be provided by care homes, as part of a ready-for-home package after being discharged from hospital or used at home to support independent living for as long as possible.

The BuddyWotch also acts as a Bluetooth hub, transmitting data from the Company's other Activ8rlives Bluetooth medical devices and those from partner suppliers, to make it easier to provide reminders for medication from inhaler trackers like the PuffClicker or to measure blood pressure or weight, as some examples.

Now in its final stages of development and transfer to production, the EU patent enables the company to begin identifying commercialisation partners who provide healthcare services to patients or need continuous patient monitoring during clinical trials of new medication, with a particular focus on overseas markets.

The BuddyWotch will be CE-marked as a Class IIb medical device, reflecting its role as a "life-critical medical monitor" replacing a bedside vital signs monitor for home-use, rather than a consumer-level accessory. This has been made possible through the development of Aseptika's MediOS, a real-time operating system designed by the company to be a clinically certifiable operating system for use in a range of medical monitors.

MediOS will be used in future medical devices to enable the company's and its future partner's to fast-track development and quickly gain a CE-mark by using a previously certified and stable operating system, which can be strictly controlled and only updated after extensive testing to ensure security vulnerabilities and bugs have not be introduced.

BuddyWotch and MediOS have been developed with support from pre-procurement contracts from SBRI Healthcare and grants from UKRI (formerly Innovate UK).