Dive Brief:
- Takeda Pharmaceuticals has launched iBData, a pilot digital program to help patients and their physicians manage inflammatory bowel disease.
- A collaboration between Takeda, Texas Digestive Disease Consultants, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, the watch-like wearable is designed to allow patients to track their symptoms and lifestyle factors.
- The pilot will involve 100 patients, and will transmit data to physicians; the reports will help both patients and physicians to communicate more effectively.
Dive Insight:
Wearable technology, which sits at the crossroads of healthcare and hi-tech, has the potential to change how patients manage their health, and how physicians measure outcomes and decide on treatment regimens. While ‘patient empowerment’ can be seen as a bit of a marketing buzz phrase, helping patients to take control of their own disease management can help to improve their outcomes.
Wearables have the advantage that they are always with patients, either collecting data automatically or reminding patients when they need to take readings and input data. By transmitting reports of patients’ data to the physicians, wearable devices like iBData can show patients how their lifestyle, diet and treatments affect their symptoms day-to-day or even hour-to-hour. It can also help physicians learn more about how they manage patients.
"The wearable aspect of the technology being used for iBData provides an opportunity to investigate how we as physicians monitor, assess and treat our patients," said Tim Ritter, medical director at Luminal Research, Texas Digestive Disease Consultants.
And this is a growing market; the global wearable medical technology market could have a CAGR as high as 50%. They also have a significant role in clinical devices, with analysts suggesting that around half of the leading 100 pharma companies using them in clinical trials by 2019. With companies like Google predicting wearable devices becoming a normal standard in preventive care, it looks like they are here to stay.