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A System for Frailty Assessment, Frailty Mitigation, and Clinical Research

Published:
Lead Inventor: Mark Ferguson
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SUMMARY

  • Frailty is a condition that often affects the elderly. It is characterized by increased susceptibility to physiologic stressors such as illness and major surgery. Screening for frailty in our thoracic surgery population indicates that nearly 70% of patients are frail or prefrail at the time they are referred to our outpatient clinic for possible surgery.
  • Potential adverse outcomes after major surgery include a higher rate of complications and mortality, longer duration of hospital stay, more likely discharge to other–than-home, increased rates of readmissions, and higher costs of hospitalization.
  • Frailty can be modified in some patients through preoperative exercise (prehabilitation), often with as little as 1 week of high  intensity training. In patients undergoing lung resection for cancer, for example, preoperative exercise is associated with measurable improvement in preoperative lung function and decreased pulmonary and other complications.
  • The faculty inventor developed a new system addressing both technological and human factors associated with challenges with frailty screening and mitigation. The inventor developed a comprehensive platform for conducting screening with a tool that is easy to use and clinically effective that does not require the need to transfer written patient physiologic and survey data into datasets; and allows easy transfer of digital data into accessible storage. On the human side, the platform allows a mechanism to remotely assist patients with exercise techniques, the ability to remind patients to perform their daily exercises, the ability for patients to log exercise that isn’t electronically tracked, and a method for recording how much exercise patients are performing.

 

FIGURE

ADVANTAGES

ADVANTAGES

  • Real-time tracking of activity and automated patient reminders
  • Automated data storage
  • Self-contained

APPLICATIONS

  • Comprehensive platform for screening and identification of frail patients
  • Prehabilitation compliance