FACET, European project to improve the quality of life of frail and pre-frail adults and elderly

After three years of work GMV has presented in a Madrid workshop the new features of its inhouse antari HomeCare platform for clinical management of the elderly and pre-frail.

Javier Téllez, GMV’s Smart Health specialist, ran through these new features that have now been phased into the latest version, developed under the European research and innovation project FACET (FrAilty Care and wEll funcTion): “personalized interventions and therapy plans (nutritional algorithms, medication, physical exercise plans) for all-round, coordinated, ongoing care involving all stakeholders (physicians and patients)”.

GMV has likewise developed the necessary technology to safeguard privacy of research data, in due compliance with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the corresponding legislation of each participating country. Particularly worthy of note here is that FACET “is one of the few Randomized Clinical Trials (RCT) on frailty at national and international levels”.

In the words of Marco Pugliese, CLC Director of EIT Health Spain, FACET is “one of the most interesting projects in EIT Health’s innovation portfolio. Speaking as the Spanish node of EIT Health, we take great pride in this project’s success, for several reasons: firstly, because many of the project stakeholders are EIT Health Spain members; secondly, and crucially, because this project responds to specific healthcare needs and inputs groundbreaking frailty solutions, sorely needed as the population grows older”.

Data, sensors and alerts

The platform developed by GMV processes data and gives information on the patient’s state, not only physiological but also behavioral, nutritional, functional and cognitive. This then allows the clinician to keep up ongoing monitoring constantly brought into line with the findings at each moment. The data is obtained with sensors that allow healthcare specialists to keep track of the patients’ state without these patients leaving their homes.

Téllez takes up the story: “a system of alerts has been set up combining parameters of all types, both quantitative and qualitative; to tell the monitoring professional when something is not right so that he or she can take the appropriate remedial action as soon as possible”. For example, a biomarkers panel keeps up precise and objective monitoring of changes in the diet patterns implying risk of frailty.

The research using antari HomeCare has centered on two groups of patients. The first of them is being monitored by the Madrid Health Service (Servicio Madrileño de Salud) in the Hospital of Getafe; this involves a clinical trial due to run until mid-2019. The second group is made up by patients in Aberystwyth (Wales), who are participating in a pilot scheme to prove the platform’s efficacy in community medicine, “in the context of a widely scattered population with no easy access to medical services”, as the GMV specialist points out.

Communication and education

The antari HomeCare platform keeps physicians and patients closely connected. This is conducive to early detection of risk situations and identification of groups among the working population that are likely to suffer from frailty in the near future. Furthermore, FACET has also brokered frailty awareness-raising activities among professionals and the public. These involve online frailty-recognition courses, training and instruction sessions and frailty workshops, among other initiatives.

GMV has worked closely with organizations like Abbott, the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, the Servicio Madrileño de Salud, Atos, the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Instituto Nacional de Salud e Investigación Médica: INSERM); Aberystwyth University and PREMAP in the FACET project, which sets out to improve the quality of life of 13.05 million persons.