Digital healthcare company Intelesant will partner with the NHS in a trial intended to help dementia sufferers remain at home for longer.
The Greater Manchester firm’s Howz app, which tracks heat, light and movement and notifies care givers and family of any abnormalities, will be used as part of the £5.2million NHS Test Bed trial.
The Internet of Things Test Bed, led by Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, aims to reduce hospital admissions through self-care.
Intelesant CEO Jonathan Burr said: “We are incredibly excited to be one of the partners in this hugely important Test Bed project.
“Working with NHS Trusts and the rest of the project’s partners will give us with the opportunity to demonstrate how new technologies can be utilised to create models of care that are better equipped to deal with elderly and frail patients and dementia sufferers.”
Seven NHS trusts across the country have been awarded grants, funded by NHS England and Innovate UK.
NHS chief executive Simon Stevens said: “Over the next decade major health gains won’t just come from a few ‘miracle cures’, but also from combining diverse breakthroughs in fields such as biosensors, medtech and drug discovery, mobile communications, and AI computing.
“Our new NHS Test Beds programme aims to cut through the hype and test the practical benefits for patients when we bring together some of these most promising technologies in receptive environments inside the world’s largest public, integrated health service.”
Burr told a BusinessCloud roundtable this summer that convincing investors to fund start-ups in the North West at the expense of overseas firms is difficult.
“You’re looking for people with enough vision and guts to take a bit of a risk on a good idea which is not proven – that’s the biggest barrier to innovation in health,” he said.