Prof Brian Caulfield, a University College Dublin (UCD) connected health researcher, has won the 2015 Google Wearables in Healthcare Pilot Challenge.
The Challenge, organised by Medstro in partnership with MedTech Boston and Google, took place at the end of last week at Google’s Cambridge headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Prof Caulfield was one of 10 finalists, selected from 90 entries, who delivered a pitch to a team of judges on proposed uses for wearables not yet integrated into the healthcare system, followed by a question and answer session.
The successful pitch showed a way to use the sensing and computing capability of mobile phones to underpin a comprehensive rehabilitation support platform for patients undergoing elective orthopaedic surgery.
The focus of Prof Caulfield’s research programme in the UCD School of Public Health, Physiotherapy & Population Science is on exploiting technological advances to enhance human performance in the fields of connected health and sport.
Prof Caulfield is also Dean of Physiotherapy at UCD and is a director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics.
Prof Caulfield said: “Winning this challenge will help to validate our solution of using the sensors in smartphones to assist people undergoing orthopaedic rehabilitation.
“Our idea addresses the unmet needs that patients and clinicians cite as the major challenges to successful rehabilitation outcome and satisfaction with care. By using a mobile phone as a sensing device, we are removing the need to purchase additional sensing hardware to provide patients with a solution to their problems, with all the associated costs that this involves.”
Prof Caulfield’s team working on this project includes two physical therapists, Dr Diarmaid Fitzgerald and Dr Oonagh Giggins, both PhD graduates from his programme at UCD, and Professor Tahar Kechadi, UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics.
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