Eurotech provides advances in Healthcare Technology

By integrating Eurotech’s Embedded Gateways with Cloud based data delivery infrastructures, high performance connectivity is provided between dispersed systems to give medical staff hugely enhanced support in the diagnosis and treatment of patients. Using Eurotech’s Device to Cloud (EDC) approach offers huge flexibility with major cost savings on IT infrastructure, whilst providing built-in reliability and data security. With practically infinite scalability, tens of thousands of devices and device categories can be added to a network without re-engineering or purchasing additional infrastructure hardware. Available across a range devices including embedded, fixed, mobile and wearable computers, Eurotech’s Everyware™ Software Framework (ESF) facilitates the seamless integration of systems within this advanced communications environment.

The Eurotech Everyware™ Medical Gateway uses this connectivity to communicate to medical devices at the patient’s home, managing data delivery requirements for conditions such as diabetes, congestive heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease as well as monitoring the patient’s adherence to taking prescribed medication. Based on Eurotech’s Helios™ communication gateway, this application hosting device offers standard interfaces to a wide variety of medical devices, including the Roche Glucose meter and A&D Medical’s weight scale machine and blood pressure cuff. Via its flexible communications options, it transmits data in real time over the Cloud network to physicians monitoring patient conditions and, through supporting home care programmes, leads to significant reductions in hospital admissions. Based on open standards promoted by Continua Health Alliance, the Everyware™ Medical Gateway is user friendly and simple to start up, ensuring it can be deployed by staff visiting patients at home.

Tim Taberner of Eurotech comments: “Cloud computing is used round the clock by businesses and private individuals for a wide variety of tasks from social networking to online banking, with increasing numbers of business critical or sensitive applications being deployed. Security, resilience and privacy are an inherent part of the fabric of the Cloud, which normally provides far greater levels of protection than an organisations own IT infrastructure.Once the myth that this is not the case has been dispelled, users become very enthusiastic about the exciting technological environment offered by EDC and ESF with the flexibility and cost effectiveness it provides to allow their businesses to rapidly react to market changes. These benefits are equally valid for supporting healthcare providers in managing development and organisation in hospitals, clinics and practices."

What has now been made possible with EView and the data capture capabilities of the Eurotech device is a quality and depth of respiratory information similar to that seen by clinicians when monitoring a patient’s heart rate and other vital indicators.  Able  to store, retrieve and maintain data when shut down, EView both aids clinicians in selecting treatment options and provides invaluable information to medical researchers in their study of respiratory conditions.

With systems and solutions already deployed in Eurotech’s US market, these developments are now rapidly gaining interest in Europe and the rest of the world. The US experience provides useful indicators about the expanding potential of communications and data management technology in healthcare. With today’s emphasis in Europe for organisational change in both state and private sector medicine, the possibilities of additional support in areas such as remote patient monitoring can become very attractive to medical decision makers.