Remote patient monitoring firm Casana is partnering the University of Florida in a trial to measure IoT home health devices versus traditional telemonitoring approaches in chronic health management.

Casana will be working with the University’s Precision Health Research Centre (UF PHRC) with the purpose of establishing a baseline for adherence of traditional telemonitoring devices in the home compared to the adherence rates of a non-invasive IoT-based smart monitor developed by Casana.

The study is of a new non-invasive home health monitoring device built into a toilet seat called The Heart Seat. The Heart Seat has been designed with the goal of providing reliable monitoring of health parameters for patients in their home, to help patients and their care teams manage chronic conditions. The Heart Seat has not yet been cleared by the FDA for clinical use.

The study will be conducted by UF PHRC in The Villages, an age-restricted community of around 130,000 people in Sumter County, Florida. 81.6% of the population of The Villages is over the age of 65.

Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) is monitoring patients outside conventional clinical settings. Capturing data points consistently over time and performing trend analysis has the potential to significantly improve health outcomes. The American Heart Association (AHA) believes that, “RPM can provide a more holistic view of a patient’s health over time, increase visibility into a patient’s adherence to a treatment, and enable timely intervention before a costly care episode.” (AHA, Using Remote Patient Monitoring.).

The goal of the study is to collect data on the endpoint of adherence for in-home health monitoring devices to fill the gap in research data available on this topic. Casana and UF PHRC are collaborating on this study with the shared belief that reliable data from the home, collected between doctors’ visits, could provide clinical teams with data to help manage patients’ conditions.

According to Carla VandeWeerd, PhD, Director of UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute at UF PHRC, “remote patient monitoring has the potential to significantly impact the healthcare system, and in particular, for communities like our partners at The Villages, by facilitating the transition from reactive care to proactive and preventive care, from the comfort of one’s home. The use of RPM is still quite low. We are using this study to understand a baseline of RPM adherence rates and evaluate The Heart Seat adherence rates.”

In the BEAT-HF trial, when secondary analysis looked into only adherent subpopulations, hospitalisation endpoints were achieved, but not met across the entire study population. Low adherence rates seem to be a contributor to the low outcome measurements.

“We believe improving adherence with in-home heart health monitoring devices will help promote the accelerated adoption of at-home health,” said Austin McChord, CEO of Casana. “Many devices require patient and/or caregiver intervention and are frequently plagued by user error. These factors are particularly challenging for elderly patients, who we believe will greatly benefit from enabling health in the home, if done without adding burden.”