Cystic fibrosis patients require lifelong care.
Previously, they would have an annual hospital appointment, where vital measurements such as weight, lung function and heart rate were recorded.
Sometimes, if their results were too low, it would be because they had an infection and needed to be admitted as an emergency inpatient to receive intravenous antibiotics.
As adults receiving care in a regional centre – sometimes up to 100 miles away from home – this has a huge impact on people’s lives, impacting childcare, work and social plans.
In January 2019, Royal Papworth launched a programme called Project Breathe, which built upon years of previous research into remote monitoring.
Under Project Breathe, patients are given monitoring equipment and record daily the same measurements they would only have taken once a year.
Not only does this give people more control and knowledge over their health and how they are feeling, these measurements are uploaded to an app in real-time.
Clinicians and nurses back at Royal Papworth Hospital can log-in and look at how people are performing, so patients can stay well at home or be brought into hospital if needed.
The data is also used in machine learning algorithms. As well as avoiding the usual clinic attendances, early results show that the model can identify a decline in a patient’s condition an average of 11 days earlier than antibiotics would typically be started.
Virtual clinics and home monitoring has surged in use across the NHS during and since the coronavirus pandemic. Project Breathe has been ahead of the curve in that respect.
If we can also intervene earlier, we should be able to protect patients – in this case their lungs – from long-term, ongoing damage.
Project Breathe is a collaboration between Royal Papworth Hospital, Microsoft Research, the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, the University of Cambridge, and social enterprise project Magic Bullet.
It has since been expanded to Scotland (Edinburgh and Glasgow), Wales (Cardiff) and Canada (Toronto).
