Apple wants its devices to be able to monitor the health status of asthma suffers as evidenced by a new patent filing for a “Monitoring System for Assessing Control of a Disease State.”
About the patent filing
The patent filing relates to noninvasive, diagnostic, medical devices, systems and methods. More specifically, this application is related to methods for monitoring and managing chronic medical conditions. The patent filing could involve medical conditions other than asthma, but that’s the health problem most mentioned in the patent filing details.
In fact, the patent filing notes that approximately 300 million individuals worldwide are affected by asthma, and in the United States there are approximately 23 million individuals with asthma, resulting in 1.7 million emergency department visits each year and 10.1 million lost workdays.
A number of technologies have been developed to allow asthma patients to better monitor their disease outside the hospital. These technologies mainly target improving adherence to therapy or detection of exacerbations. However, Apple says that one challenge of some of these technologies, is that they use relatively late indicators of worsening disease status that limit their ability to improve the effectiveness of short-term and long-term disease management.
Other technologies focus on trying to reduce exacerbation events, which represents only a small component of what it means to have control over a disease. However, these technologies don’t provide insights into long-term control and are not developed as a management tool for clinicians that would inform pharmacologic therapy choices and other interventions designed to improve long-term control, according to Apple.
The tech giant says that this means “a substantial gap remains in the ability to reliably measure and monitor asthmatic status outside of healthcare facilities.” Apple’s patent filing involves a system and method for monitoring asthma status outside the hospital that “would empower families and healthcare providers to more effectively manage the disease.”
Apple adds that “ideally,” the system and method described in the patent filing might be used for monitoring other disease states, such as allergies, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, hypertension, autoimmune disorders, migraine or other neurologic disease, obstructive sleep apnea, cystic fibrosis, arthritis and other rheumatologic conditions, seizure disorders, cardiovascular disease, peripheral vascular disease and/or congestive heart failure.
Summary of the patent filing
Here’s Apple’s abstract of the paten filing: “Devices, systems and methods are provided to assist with the monitoring or management of a patient’s medical condition, which have one or more sensors sensing individual patient data on or near the patient. This individual patient data corresponds to at least one physiological parameter of the patient and includes a sensor that does not require the patient to apply it or activate it.
“The data is then transmitted to a processor for computing a risk or status signal that is based on comparison from a baseline related to a patient or related population and an alert or alarm can be generated based on the result of the signal.”
