Engineering And Miller School Researchers Collaborate On New Automated Health Monitoring System

In a less-expensive form of telemedicine, patients with asthma, diabetes, and other serious medical conditions will soon be able to report their health status and symptoms to physicians and nurses by accessing a form of technology owned and used by millions of people everyday: a telephone.

Telemedicine: The Miller School’s Bernard Roos, left, and the College of Engineering’s Herman Cheung are collaborators on a new automated system that would allow patients to monitor their health and report symptoms via cell phones and home telephones.

A new automated, interactive voice-recognition system, developed by researchers from the University of Miami’s College of Engineering and Miller School of Medicine, would make automated telephone calls to patients everyday, employing prerecorded scripts to check up on whether they are experiencing breathing problems, fluctuations in weight, or any of a host of other health conditions.

“The goal is to get patients to be more proactive about their health,” says Herman Cheung, the James L. Knight Chair and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at UM who helped develop the system. “They can use their phones to report information about their health and manage their disease.”

Here’s how it would work:

Patients who sign up for the service would get an automated call to their cell or home phone each day, and depending on what condition they have, would be read a script of health-related questions to which they would give either a yes or no answer. The system would also alert patients to take their medications or perform other prescribed daily routines such as testing their blood pressure or blood glucose levels.

Using data mining technology, the system would also record and store information entered by patients, and a built-in fail-safe feature, triggered by an answer that indicates a potential health problem, would immediately route the patient to an on-call nursing service or physician.

“The key elements that are delivered here are quality assurance and lower costs,” says Bernard Ross, professor of medicine and director of the Division of Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine, who teamed with Cheung in creating the system. “We know how to manage diseases, but we don’t have the communication to educate, to maintain the surveillance. So this automation process assures that the patient is taken care of according to best-practice guidelines.”

According to Roos, the system will cover 80 percent of the five most common causes of disability and hospitalization, including congestive heart failure, hypertension and stroke, chronic obstructive lung disease, asthma, and diabetes.

Roos says about 70 percent of a nurse’s time is spent monitoring the health of a patient. The system he and Cheung created automates that process, freeing up health care providers to take care of patients who need immediate help.

UM Innovation, which develops university-generated treatments or devices and works with businesses to take that technology into the marketplace, helped Cheung and Roos get a patent for their system.

The system could be on the market within two years, Cheung says, noting that the Miami-based company that partnered with them on its development, GenerationOne, “is already in very active negotiations with a number of large, national medical insurance groups” that would make the automated system available to patients.