Cambridge Consultants' wireless medical device interoperability system, Vena is gearing up to unveil a connected asthma inhaler prototype at the Respiratory Drug Delivery Europe event in Portugal this month, according to a report over at MedGadget.
The device aims to offer patients a direct link to doctors and online applications to help them improve compliance and improve treatment. As you would expect, the inhaler can be programmed to remind users when to take their treatment and can then automatically record its use so caregivers can remotely monitor the patient's compliance through an online portal or alerts.The connected inhaler can connect via Bluetooth to a nearby personal computer or smart phone to an online personal healthcare application, and can remind the patient to take their treatment and send compliance information to the relevant personal healthcare portal.
Interestingly, the company also suggests that "non-patient-specific data from a population of users can also be aggregated to provide medical researchers, insurance providers and even policy makers with information to better evaluate a therapy's efficacy... Pharmaceutical companies with new therapies in Phase IV trials can directly access usage data to demonstrate and document compliance, correlating ongoing use with improved outcomes," the company's press release states.
