There is an undeniable need for new technologies to support the complex management of chronic disease. We are seeing a steady rise in demand for accessible health services to care for our aging and chronically ill population. Individuals living with multiple long-term conditions require increasingly rigorous treatment regimes that cannot be solely sustained within hospital or clinic walls. In-person synchronous consultations are not always needed (eg, when disease is stable) or possible (eg, in times of pandemic) and require a balance of risk and convenience to appropriately allocate care. Yet in the face of this adversity, we have witnessed innovations in healthcare due to the advancement and increasing acceptance of mobile and network technologies in society. Our thematic pursuit of remote monitoring and virtual care lies at the intersection of these challenges and opportunities. Across the continuum of care, our aims are to discover:
- How to derive patterns of health and disease from remotely collected active and passive sensing data so that we gain better, actionable insights of what happens to patients outside the clinical environment.
- How to harness the potential of remote monitoring by integrating these enhanced insights into clinical and self-management decisions to improve health services and patients’ experience and outcomes.
- How to develop and scale up models for virtual care delivery, through deploying remote monitoring technologies or otherwise, so that healthcare systems become more personalised, equitable, and sustainable.
To successfully translate new knowledge into practice, this theme will take an interdisciplinary approach by bringing together academics, clinicians, and industry partners who cover a wide range of skills and knowledge: from engineering and human computer interaction to health informatics and data analytics, and from medicine and health services research to decision making and behaviour change.
Hub leads
