A medical wireless gateway packed snuggly into a watch

Compact, highly integrated, and qualitatively im-peccable: Leikr’s state-of-the-art solutions raise expectations for IoT wearables to the next level. Their assisted ambient living and telemedicine watch, is a case in point - securely connecting medical IoT sensors to cloud-based eHealth platforms.

Developed in the pre-COVID-19 era, a blueprint for a wearable wireless medical gateway holds the promise to boost the autonomy of patients requiring 24/7  monitoring and increase the capacity of ICUs. Telemedicine means you can treat and monitor patients without physical contact – a significant advantage when treating a virus that spreads easily. At the same time, this kind of eHealth solution can help increase capacity at the hospital or clinic, by taking patients out of the clinic and treating them at home and enabling healthcare professionals to treat and monitor more patients simultaneously.

“The pandemic has been a wake-up call that not everything is best treated in hospitals and clinics,” said Lars Møller, CEO, Leikr. “There is a lot of value for both patients and healthcare providers when able to treat patients remotely with telemedicine.”

Responding within minutes

Telemedicine is most interesting when it helps to react to events within 15 to 30 minutes, for example, when blood oxygen levels trend away from acceptable values in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), often suffering from infections. If you detect that their blood oxygen is low and their body temperature is rising, there’s a very good chance that an infection is under development, in which case you can ask the patient to take antibiotics. Medication can be given before it gets severe so that patients are not sent to the hospital with an acute situation because they were not treated in time.

Always with the patient

There are other nonportable wireless gateways that relay physiological data from medical sensors to the cloud, but they all suffer from the fact that patients need to stay in their proximity, restricting patient mobility to rooms that are within coverage of the stationary gateway. This, of course, lowers the quality of life of the patients, who could live a somewhat normal life if they were allowed to walk around while being monitored. There are solutions out there that use standard cellular networks, but these often provide poor connectivity inside patients’ homes. the patient’s room, they are still able to monitor their vital signs.