Patient monitoring, business

Axon develops chronic disease monitoring software for home PC

5 November 2007

Axon Limited has developed a patient-monitoring system that runs on a normal PC with no bespoke hardware and enables chronic disease patients to be monitored from their homes.

With the rising costs of managing chronic illnesses worldwide, new ways are needed to reduce the burden on overstretched healthcare services. Governments and healthcare professionals are aware that they need to redesign healthcare pathways and effectively monitor patients suffering from chronic diseases.

Diabetes is one chronic illness that is forecast to overwhelm healthcare services on its own. The majority of diabetics do not manage their condition well because they are not intensively managed. There is verifiable clinical evidence to show that intensive monitoring to maintain blood glucose levels near to normal levels decreases the frequency and severity of complications, improves health and reduces costs of healthcare.

Southampton, UK-based Axon Limited, a spin-out from the University of Kent, has developed a software package called Axon T4NET that runs on a home PC with no bespoke hardware and allows patients to be remotely monitored from their homes.

A diabetic patient downloads data wirelessly from a glucose meter and/or insulin pump into their home PC. This data is transmitted via the Internet and stored on a secure Axon fileserver. Within seconds, the patient sees the results, in graphical form, on their PC.

At the same time, the data enters the medical team's patient record. Patients can receive or send messages and/or videoconference with their nurse, doctor or hospital consultant from within the system.

Screenshot of a patient's record chart

The system is suitable for the management of all chronic disease, though the initial focus is on the chronic disease of diabetes as it is a global problem of epidemic proportions.

The company plans to launch Axon T4NET in mid November.

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