Modern healthcare relies on cross-sector collaboration to cure its ills. From Indian academics working with doctors and engineers on tech that will tackle local health issues, to Arm’s UK partners driving the future of remote patient care. It is all about working together to release innovative ideas fast.
The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay sits amid lavish greenery near the shore of Powai Lake, Mumbai, a global leader in the field of engineering education, research, innovation and entrepreneurship. It is home to the Biomedical Engineering & Technology Incubation Center (BETiC), established in 2014 to catalyze innovation, and entrepreneurship in indigenous medical devices. BETiC’s guiding principle: the rapid translation of groundbreaking ideas to create high-quality and affordable medical devices – designed for the local population.
In just a few years, BETiC has established itself as a true center of innovation, with more than 100 doctors and engineers working closely to tackle India’s specific healthcare challenges. These partnerships help identify pressing issues in the field, while employing practical tech innovations to address them effectively and efficiently.
“Higher education institutes like IITs are increasingly expected to take up research and innovation activities to solve the pressing needs of society,” says Professor B. Ravi, Institute Chair Professor for Mechanical Engineering at IIT Bombay, and head of BETiC. “This requires close collaboration, between different disciplines within academia and with industry and government agencies.”
“Partnering with Arm has given us access to the latest technology and helped accelerate the process of creating innovative solutions that are well suited to India’s healthcare conditions.”
One of BETiC’s key external partners is the Arm University Program, which has given the center access to industry-standard tools for medical device development. This equipment has proven critical for keeping BETiC’s engineers at the cutting-edge of medical innovation.
“Healthcare is a dynamic sector and requires effective solutions in as short a span of time as possible,” says Professor Ravi, “so it has become a necessity for research teams to have world-class instruments, reducing the scope of errors to a minimum. Partnering with Arm has given us access to the latest technology and helped accelerate the process of creating innovative solutions that are well suited to India’s healthcare conditions.”
BETiC’s collaborative cross-sector approach to cutting-edge ideas and fast turnarounds is a shining example of what the wider healthcare industry needs to overcome today’s biggest challenges. As witnessed in the innovative reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic.
When the Coronavirus first hit, the world was struck by a potentially critical shortage in ventilators, the breathing apparatus essential for recovery in patients severely affected. The response? A DIY culture of rapid ventilator development suddenly sprang up. It turns out that with just a few valves, some tubing and hobby electronics, artificial lungs can be inflated and deflated in a controlled manner.
But this spirit of fast-paced solutions was not just taking place in ad hoc workshops. In the UK, for example, engineers came together in a striking cross-sector collaboration. Competing F1 companies such as McLaren and Renault even put aside racing rivalries to pool their engineering minds together (alongside the likes of Arm) for the sake of the common good. Without dismissing the severity of the health issue, it was a thrilling time to be an engineer.
But Covid-19 also highlighted long standing tensions between healthcare and innovation. Even when medical entrepreneurs and engineers are in full flow, they are often sent crashing off course by debilitating regulatory approval processes and other industry roadblocks. Healthcare requires effective solutions in as short a span of time as possible – but it is not a sector in which start-ups can easily get new ideas to market. Many ventilators concepts, for example, failed to meet the complex regulatory standards, and never made it to patients.
This is a common problem.
“Because of the challenges, many companies with insightful technology fail to commercialize solutions leading to gaps in care,” says Peter Ferguson, Arm’s director of healthcare technologies.
India certainly presents BETiC with plenty of medical challenges to get its teeth into. The country has a rapidly increasing population, but limited resources. The number of doctors per head is inadequate to provide the standard of service needed. There is a lack of key medical equipment in rural areas, which indirectly increases the pressure on healthcare facilities in urban areas. So the focus there has to be on low-cost devices to enable extensive screening: early prediction can decrease complications and significantly reduce the cost of treatment.
As such, the doctors and engineers at BETiC are particularly interested in recent advances in electronics, especially powerful, low-cost elements that sense, process, and connect data. One example of its innovation is the SMART stethoscope. Heart and lung diseases have become the top causes of death in India. And correct diagnosis requires effective auscultation – listening to chest sounds.
“Conventional stethoscopes require considerable training and concentration on the part of doctors to identify the relevant sound patterns, especially in a noisy environment,” says Professor Ravi. “We’ve created an innovative module that converts conventional stethoscopes into digital ones. It enables sound amplification, noise filtering and also has a provision to transfer the body sound to a PC, laptop, or a mobile device.”
BETiC’s SMART stethoscope, which uses Arm Cortex-M0+ and M4 controllers to control the signals. And, a Cortex-M0+ controller to run the Bluetooth low energy stack, is already used by doctors in dozens of primary health centers to record and send auscultated sounds to experts for a second opinion.
There are plenty of other innovations – from the SMART Clubfoot Brace, designed to treat clubfoot, to a glaucoma screening device to enable early treatment to prevent blindness. All of which run on Arm Cortex M controllers, optimized for cost- and energy-efficient processing.
“Since BETiC began working with doctors, we have identified 400 specific unmet needs and created 200 novel concepts for them,” says Professor Ravi. “I am particularly proud that we’ve already filed 50 patents. BETiC has developed 20 devices, incubated 15 start-ups, licensed five products to industry and rapidly launched them into the market.”
Covid-19 represented a genuine opportunity to change healthcare for the better, the urgency of the pandemic driving the issue of health front and center and new solutions out to the field fast.
Healthcare tech is fraught with many other challenges – such as how to manage patient data security and privacy when AI and other data analytics are becoming increasingly prevalent. Here Covid-19 represented a genuine opportunity to change healthcare for the better. The urgency of the pandemic driving the issue of health front and center for governments and individuals worldwide, and new solutions out to the field fast.
So, we now see robots conducting remote triage and disinfecting hospital wards, helping to keep patients and medical teams safe. AI is being harnessed to explore how novel genes interact. And the World Health Organization is actively encouraging on-the-ground innovation from entrepreneurs in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya to help fight the virus.
People also saw how powerful all that patient data could be – in powering effective track and trace systems to help contain and weaken the virus. For example, with the likes of Facebook and Google using data for their own Covid-mapping efforts. With healthcare data now available in such volumes, researchers can serve as what Ferguson calls “global health meteorologists” –informing politicians where additional measures are required and influencing the public to change behaviors.
These are advances that may have taken years to come to fruition otherwise.
“There will be many lessons we can learn from this period,” says Ferguson. “But when dealing with novel pandemics, and other health challenges, designing flexible solutions that can rapidly and securely inform and adapt to clinical evidence at scale is vital.”
“Since BETiC began working with doctors, we have identified 400 specific unmet needs and created 200 novel concepts for them. We have developed 20 devices, incubated 15 start-ups, licensed five products to industry and rapidly launched them into the market.”
If any company is well-built to be an industry partner for this kind of collaboration, it is Arm. The company is founded on a culture of working together to solve communal problems. It knows how to understand the commercial and strategic value of proposed solutions. It is built to complete cycles of innovation fast. And, crucially, its engineers know they do not have all the answers. It knows how to listen.
And applying these principles in the medical space is no different to anywhere else.
“Arm is not expert at creating patient-orientated medical devices,” says Ferguson, “but we understand the technology at the silicon layers and security layers. It is about understanding the benefit you can offer and working with partners who add vision, technology, and domain expertise. That is key to innovating and creating change.
For a recent example, look at Arm’s development of the Managed Medical Device Cloud (MMDC), produced in partnership with L2S2. L2S2 holds and processes over 100 million patient records on behalf of the UK’s NHS Digital, and analyzes the data to produce highly sensitive hospital quality reports.
From listening to its healthcare partners, Arm understood that while wireless connectivity in medical devices is increasingly common, the devices rarely interface directly into clinical medical records or provide triage of normal and abnormal readings. If remote medical devices could be directly connected, doctors would be able to focus their time on new valuable clinical insight derived from data gathered from a growing breadth of sources in a patient’s home.
Using resources from across Arm, as well as solutions from its partners, Arm was able to combine all the benefits of the fast moving IoT industry with a fully integrated, certified, and experienced NHS partner. MMDC put integrated data, devices and services into clinical environments, serving as a great example of how to build collaborative partnerships that offer building blocks others can use and extend.
“MMDC is making the future of remote patient care possible,” says Ferguson. “It allows a clinician to ‘prescribe’ patient monitoring with the click of a mouse – from then on, real-world information is visible from within the patient record. It enables more medical-grade devices to be delivered to more patients for improved monitoring and patient care. And with more data from more patients, clinicians, and hospitals, it is improved analytics, insight, and care provision.”
The long-term prognosis for collaboration, innovation, and entrepreneurship at BETiC, meanwhile, looks strong too. Current developments include a new addition to the SMART Clubfoot Brace monitor, which can be attached to existing braces, designed for increased compliance and reduced recurrence. There is a novel user-friendly ECG electrode patch that can be easily attached to patients for accurate and long-time monitoring. There is a screening device to earlier detect chronic obstructive pulmonary disorders such as asthma, increasingly prevalent due to the region’s high pollution levels. Meanwhile it is also developing an advanced training system for robotic laparoscopic surgeries.
The Covid-19 pandemic has left the world playing a waiting game. We do not know whether the virus will fade, where it will remain, and how it will mutate. What we do know is that other similar healthcare challenges are sure to emerge. But in the swift response the pandemic has forced, the world has learned a huge amount about medical innovation – and not just the power of nimble, cross-sector collaboration.
“The pandemic reminds us that society is incredibly interconnected, whether you are the only family on a 1,000-acre range or head of state or in the slums,” says Ferguson. “And it’s shown us that healthcare is not limited to the consultation room, the hospital or even a single country. The experience of successfully treating any patient in any part of the world has value to the global population.”
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