PDeng project on “Outpatient Monitoring Kit for clinical studies”

In healthcare, the remote monitoring of patients is of increasing importance, even more driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. With remote monitoring, patients are continuously monitored outside the hospital, either before hospitalization (e.g. for chronically ill persons) or afterwards (e.g. patients dismissed after a clinical intervention such as an operation). The advantages of remote patient monitoring are manifold, compared to hospital care. Patient wellbeing and comfort are increased since the person can stay in her/his preferred home environment and close to their relatives. For healthcare providers, decisions for clinical examinations or interventions comprising hospitalization can be taken more precisely on the basis of long-term information, increasing the healthcare provider's experience, the productivity and the clinical outcome.

Remote patient monitoring is typically performed with wearable devices, such as a wristband or patch, and self-operated spot measurement devices such as weighting scales or blood pressure monitors. Similar devices are already known in the consumer domain, targeting healthy lifestyle management. Such devices typically comprise algorithms and an interface to the consumer to show insightful information. In contrast, it is the vision that for healthcare applications, devices will push the monitored raw data into the cloud, where the data will be processed into meaningful insights and the result will be presented to the healthcare professionals. To develop such healthcare remote patient monitoring applications, it is required to, preferably also remotely without direct supervision, collect data from patients group via clinical studies. This data can then be used offline to develop the applications.

Philips Outpatient Monitoring Kit
At Philips Research, an Outpatient Monitoring Kit is under development. This kit comprises connectivity for monitoring devices, a telecommunications hub, and cloud software services. The kit is intended to be used during clinical studies. It is operated by study and service supervisors.

The kit remotely collects and stores data, allowing the kit to be used in observational studies. It furthermore comprises an Analytics Engine to run prototype processing algorithms, allowing to perform also interventional studies where healthcare providers might take action during the study, based upon the insights obtained via the algorithms. At a later stage, the kit, or parts thereof, may be adopted into commercial offerings.

Project purpose
It is the purpose of the project to develop the Supervision Portal part of the Outpatient Monitoring Kit, which enables study supervisors (internal or external to Philips) to configure and operate the kit, such as to manage participating patients, check patient compliance, import and export data for research purposes etc. The Supervision Portal also enables a service supervisor from Philips to add new studies and manage their study supervisors. The Supervisor Portal solution comprises GUI and application logic aspects. Its functionality should integrate as seamlessly as possible into the typical clinical study workflows, and with the typical tools used in that workflow (such as eCRF and EMR). The project tasks comprise, in alignment with Philips stakeholders:
writing a project plan
building understanding of, and documenting clinical study workflows
making an inventory of use cases and requirements, related to a.o.:
study supervision
service supervision
configurability, extendibility, scalability, privacy, security…

developing & documenting prototype Supervision Portal cloud software
integrating the Supervision Portal with the data collection and Analytics Engine functionality
iteratively testing & refining user experience with actual study and service supervisors
writing a final report

Candidates align their work with Philips stakeholders on a frequent basis. The project is envisaged to be preferably executed by two candidates who collaborate on a continuous basis. The division of the tasks over the two candidates will be done based on their respective skills. Each candidate will have her/his own project but collaboration between candidates is encouraged. Further detailed division of work will follow from the Agile development process.