From traffic safety, to wildfire mitigation and earthquake resiliency, the UBC and Rogers partnership—first launched in 2018—collaboratively develops new opportunities to explore potential applications for 5G to generate environmental and health benefits for Canadians. Projects bring together diverse research teams of faculty and students with external partners to leverage UBC’s 5G-powered smart campus; a leading-edge and first-of-its-kind infrastructure that was created through the partnership with Rogers.
The Timely and Extended Monitoring in Emergencies and Disasters (Tx MED) project is one of these applications. The aim is to use Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, AI and 5G to redefine patient care and facilitate improved outcomes in emergency departments (EDs) by using low-cost wearable system to monitor the vital signs and location of patients. The interdisciplinary and cross-sector Tx MED team brings together engineering and medical researchers, working with health care professionals to investigate new ways to improve emergency room care.
The project and partnership emerged in response to an initial call by Rogers and UBC for projects investigating how 5G could impact healthcare. The project proposal built on well-established principles of how teleoperations can deliver patient safety together with substantive savings and efficiencies to the health system, but added a greater focus on point-of-care medical attention. To mitigate instances where extended wait times can have fatal consequences, the project team brought together researchers and healthcare personnel motivated to investigate how 5G could be utilized to better enable patients to be monitored within the EDs, and potentially also throughout their subsequent recovery.
Wearable tech checks patient vitals over 5G
When it comes to serious medical conditions, positive outcomes are more likely when hospital staff can intervene sooner. Yet, we continue to see Canada’s health care system and EDs struggle with ongoing staff and bed shortages that result in progressively longer ED wait times. Though a longer-term trend, these problems were significantly exacerbated, and continue to be impacted, by the COVID-19 pandemic. From 2016 to 2017, Canadians spent an average of 3.1 hours in waiting rooms before seeing an ED doctor for an initial assessment, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. In December 2023 in Ontario, patients waited an average of 22 hours to be admitted to hospital. (https://macleans.ca/society/health/canada-er-wait-times). With the growing prevalence of influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infection it’s anticipated that these wait times will continue to worsen, particularly during flu seasons.
Wait times and patient flow in EDs is triaged by nurses who stratify patients based on the Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS), a method for grouping patients according to the severity of their condition: severely ill, requires resuscitation; requires emergent care and rapid medical intervention; requires urgent care; requires less-urgent care and requires non-urgent care. Currently, this approach cannot dynamically measure and adapt to sudden changes in patient state, but with the Tx MED wearable system, nurses will be able to continually monitor vital signs, such as heart rate and rhythm, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, temperature, and location. With patient consent, these vital data will be safely transmitted to the cloud for impact analysis by AI, through 5G or the Wi-Fi network. Any sudden and critical changes in a patient’s health status will trigger alerts to ED nurses. Anonymized individual and aggregate data can also be collated for pattern analysis to enable machine learning and better treatment outcomes. Thanks to the power and prevalence of 5G networks, Tx MED has the potential to extend the speed, security and accuracy of hospital care into patients’ homes, enabling patients and their doctors to predict health [issues] sooner, saving lives and ensuring better health outcomes.
Engineers, clinicians and healthcare organizations converge
Enabled by the partnership between UBC and Rogers, the project brings emergency medicine researchers together with engineers, data analysts and health practitioners.
The project is co-led by Dr. Kendall Ho (UBC Faculty of Medicine and Department of Emergency Medicine, Vancouver Coastal Health) and Edmond Cretu (UBC Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering), with graduate students in the labs of Cretu and Shahriar Mirabbasi (UBC Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering) handling the project’s engineering aspects, Julie Lockington (Clinical Nurse Specialist, Vancouver Coastal Health) supporting the clinical requirements, and Bhushan Gopaluni (Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering) leading analysis, visualization, and Machine Learning of patient data in the cloud. Collectively, they are working with EDs of the Vancouver General Hospital and Richmond Hospital together with Vancouver Coastal Health. Together, this interdisciplinary expertise will ensure the development of a technology and
implementation that can be embedded into the healthcare workflow to shorten ED wait times, reprioritize patient needs in real time and ultimately, save lives. The project is also contemplating how it can be developed to respond to climate-related disaster events that could further intensify the need to better triage and monitor emergency room patients.
The solutions-led value of university-industry collaboration
“The UBC-Rogers partnership is a shining example of how university-industry collaboration can create innovative solutions directed to societal impact,” says Iain Begg, Managing Director, Innovation Partnerships. “The partnership has a holistic approach to idea and project development, exhibited in the Tx MED project through the bringing together a team of engineers, clinical researchers and medical practitioners to develop AI-powered solutions to improve emergency department operations. This work addresses immediate healthcare issues and scenarios, and also builds capacity for the technology to be truly innovative, extending into areas such as disaster response. The past years have shown the need for disaster and climate response and this project and partnership place UBC at the forefront for translating research into societal impact.”
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Companies frequently approach UBC to address a narrowly defined problem or business objective by accessing university research capacity, facilities and expertise. Ongoing and strategic research collaborations, such as the UBC-Rogers 5G partnership, follow a different process, identifying broader challenges and areas of mutual interest. The partners collaborate to identify and develop research opportunities within these parameters, inspiring numerous projects that can develop and expand existing research programs and interests while leveraging new technologies and broader perspectives.
If you would like to explore how a research partnership with UBC can further your business objectives and explore innovative ways to tackle, social, health and environmental challenges, visit innovation.ubc.ca/innovation-partnerships.