Pancreum was one of the many wearable Health Tech companies that made presentations at the IDTechEx conference this week in Santa Clara, California. The company is focused on remote patient monitoring and similar applications. According to Guilherme de Paul, founder and CEO/CTO of the company, a multi-sensor system that can track patients during the days after discharge from the hospital can detect potential problems early. This can reduce the need for readmission to the hospital, which in turn can save significant amounts of healthcare costs.
The company has created a prototype device — the Core MD — that mounts directly on the skin and accepts different “wedges” that can perform different tasks. In one configuration — the Genesis System — this core module becomes a wearable artificial pancreas. One module checks the patient’s glucose level every four minutes, 24 hours a day.This data is passed wirelessly to a smartphone or other mobile device for processing. This then sends back instructions to the core module, which instructs the insulin injector wedge or the glucagon injector wedge to administer the required dosage as needed. The medicine wedges are designed to be low-cost and disposable.
The core module relies on a rechargeable battery that is designed to run for a week between charges. Pancreum has the system in clinical trials already, but the FDA reportedly is reluctant to approve an automated system such as this, so it may be a few years before it will become available.
