News

VeCare technology allows patients to spend a longer part of their recovery process at home and only to visit the doctor when necessary.

After the past events experienced within a global pandemic, the eruption of the La Palma volcano and the war in Ukraine due to Russia’s invasion, our lives have changed radically, and with this, our behaviour and our concerns.

This has meant that, apart from not being able to cover our basic needs, according to Maslow’s pyramid, safety, and more specifically health, have become one of the greatest concerns for Spanish society.

According to the latest barometer from the CIS (Social Research Centre), health problems arising from Coronavirus are the second largest concern for some 45.1% of Spaniards (just behind the economic crisis (48%), also derived from Covid-19). 

Because of this, technology has made important advances towards overcoming the public health crisis. We are increasingly searching for intelligent devices that can provide us with safety and that have perfect knowledge of our bodies. Teleassistance is one of the best solutions to this problem. From your own home, you can prevent bowel disease with the intellingent toilet, or find out your cardiac frequency, monitor your sleep or your body temperature while the smartring sends this information to your mobile device. Medicine is searching for convenience, both for health staff and for patients, with the aim of reducing intervention time, for example, with the wearable that enables electrocardiograms to be made using a smartphone, or the pyjamas that will raise an alert if you are having a heart attack.

Intelligent dressings for chronic patients

One of the latest advances in telemedicine is an intelligent dressing developed by researchers at the National University of Singapore. 

The wearable enables doctors to remotely monitor patients with chronic wounds and to find out their condition by using a mobile phone app. This allows the patient to carry out his recovery at home without the need for unnecessary travel while still maintaining direct contact with their doctor.

The transparent dressing contains a portable sensor which allows it to monitor the healing process, gather information such as temperature, types of bacteria, pH and inflammation levels.

The dressing is approved for patients with chronic venous ulcers or leg ulcers caused by circulation problems in the veins, although it is clear that they could be used for other wounds, such as foot ulcers in diabetics.  

«Traditionally, when someone has a wound or ulcer, if it is infected, the only way to examine it is to look at the wound itself by carrying out a visual inspection»,

Assures Chwee Teck Lim, lead researcher at the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Japanese university.

«If the doctor wants to obtain more information, they will obtain liquid from the wound and send it to the laboratory to carry out more tests», he affirms. «So, what we are attempting to do is to use our intelligent dressing to reduce the number of hours or days into just a few minutes», he adds.

Until now, data gathered by researchers on wounds has shown it to be effective, although the product is not yet on the market.