The Journal of mHealth Vol 1 Issue 2 (Apr 2014) | Page 31

Conference News

Philips Healthcare
Innovation Summit 2014
This year’s Philips Healthcare Innovation Event marked the
company’s 100th anniversary of involvement in healthcare
technology research. To celebrate, the event, hosted at The
King’s Fund in London, showcased some of the company’s
most recent developments and innovations for the healthcare sector. Drawing from projects that Philips has in development from around the World the company was keen to
demonstrate technologies that look set to continue this rich
heritage of healthcare innovation well into the future.
Philips has come a long way since the days of developing
early x-ray tubes. On show were technologies dedicated to
meeting the company’s ambitions of delivering health technologies that can revolutionise health and wellbeing across
the ‘complete care continuum’ of: Prevention; Diagnosis;
Treatment; Recovery; and Wellness.
A number of interesting digital and mHealth solutions were
on show.

REMOTE MONITORING TO SUPPORT PATIENTS
DURING CHEMOTHERAPY
Around 20% of cancer patients suffer from adverse events,
leading to emergency admissions and lengthy hospital stays.
Philips is developing a Home Clinical Monitoring service that
will enable the cancer patient to self-test their white blood
cells via a simple finger-prick and have the results sent to the
managing oncologist who follows the progress of the cancer treatment and monitors any progression towards adverse
events. Timely clinical intervention will then either prevent
or ameliorate the severity of these adverse events thereby
improving patient outcomes, supporting cost containment in
acute hospitals, and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of care, and overall, reducing the emotional stress on
cancer patients.
Trials of this technology have already been undertaken at
St James’s Hospital Leeds, as well as at a number of other
UK hospitals and have so far shown significant potential for
improving clinical outcomes.

eICU AND SELF-CARE OF LONG TERM
CONDITIONS
Healthcare organisations are beginning to see the need for a
truly holistic approach to care, which necessitates managing
a patient’s journey through the whole care system, irrespective of their entry point. Realistically, this requires planning
an integrated care approach to the complete patient journey

and anticipating and managing transitions between the different elements.
Philips is involved in a number of projects in the UK in which
technology, content and innovative service models are developed in collaboration with partners. This approach helps to
develop multi-disciplinary teams who can utilise telehealth
and telecare practices to manage the complete care remit
between hospital and home environments.

UNOBTRUSIVE CARDIO AND MOTION
MONITORING TECHNOLOGY
The Company has developed a technology that allows accurate and robust measurement of heart rate, body motion, as
well as other cardio-vascular parameters by means of a small
unobtrusive sensor that can be, for example, integrated into
a watch. The technology uses light reflected by the skin to
detect small changes in blood volume and sophisticated software can compensate for body motion during the measurement. The technology with its Heart-Rate measurement function has already been brought to the sports market (e.g. Alpha
by MIO, Adidas Smart Run). The devices functions are being
extended with additional measurements (e.g. heart-rate variability, breathing rate, energy expenditures, cardio-fitness estimate, motion,