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.
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. To top
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