Along with the risk for depression during pregnancy doubling during the COVID-19 pandemic, breastfeeding statistics are also telling a story of moms and babies being left under-nourished physically and emotionally, leading to a 41 percent newborn readmittance rate for feeding problems. In addition, the current IBCLC care provider-to-patient ratio is extremely high, offering one IBCLC for every 193 women and often only during regular business hours though women have breastfeeding problems all hours of the day that need to be addressed within three or four hours.

The combined solutions of Sonder and BehaVR can create a very different picture of the pregnancy and breastfeeding experience for moms and babies.

“Recent studies have shown the enormous impact that the pandemic has had on the rate of anxiety, stress and depression in pregnant women, known to have a connection to shortened gestation periods and preterm delivery — birthing factors that contribute to the high rates of maternal and infant mortality and morbidity,” said Aaron Gani, founder, and CEO of BehaVR. “NurtureVR offers pregnant moms and families a calming place to forge a deeper connection with, and understanding of, the physical and emotional changes underway, allowing for the strengthening of coping and resiliency mechanisms that can change the state of maternal mental health in the U.S. We are thrilled to have Sonder Health as a partner on this journey.”

NurtureVR was built on decades of scientific research into VR’s ability to mitigate pain related to pregnancy by creating experiential learning environments that reduce stress and improve wellbeing.

NurtureVR is a first-of-its-kind VR program developed in deep collaboration with moms, physicians, nurses and midwives at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian. It takes mom on a 22-week journey, from her third trimester through eight weeks of postpartum content, covering issues such as maternal-baby bonding, partner intimacy, stress management and hormonal and emotional changes.

Many women do not receive help for behavioral health issues, lactation or nutrition support until they discover there is a major problem, said Lauren Majors, IBCLC, co-founder and president of Sonder Health. We want to change that and give moms the support they need when they need it. Our partnership with BehaVR allows us to reach even more women and babies with the care they deserve.

With modules covering everything from nutrition to lactation to labor, NurtureVR is designed to regulate the anxieties and fears that come with the most critical phases of pregnancy. It continues through birth with eight weeks of postpartum content, covering issues such as maternal-baby bonding, partner intimacy, stress management and hormonal and emotional changes.

NurtureVR also allows women the option to personalize skin tones, environmental settings, and breastfeeding style – all in the spirit of cultivating empathy for the self and creating a deeper connection between them and their babies.

We are very excited to share the great results of the Orion Corporation Clinical Trial where Healthware was the key R&D partner creating a Digital Therapeutics solution (DTx) for chronic pain patients.

A novel treatment, a Digital Therapeutics software solution for Chronic Pain (DTxP), using Virtual Reality (VR), has shown statistically significant benefit over passive (placebo) control and standard care interventions for fear of movement, patient clinical global impression of change (PGIC) and quality of life in adult patients with chronic low back pain (CLBP). Results from the pilot study were announced at the IASP 2021 Virtual World Congress On Pain.

Background: Growing opportunities with Virtual Reality

The results from this clinical trial are very positive, and it also gives hope to find a way to bring this solution to the people with chronic pain who need it. In the future we will likely see more of these kinds of solutions being developed, also for other kinds of therapies and treatments.

Read the full article by Therese Elg, Marketing & Communications Director Nordics & Baltics, Healthware International, at www.healthwaregroup.com/blog

Breakthrough innovations often emerge on the edge of two or more science areas, which is why Digital Health Blogs decided to interview human-computer interaction expert Dr. Giulio Jacucci, a Department of Computer Science Professor at the University of Helsinki who has coordinated and co-founded numerous projects and ventures in digital health.

Giulio’s research field and competencies lie in the areas of multimodal interaction, interactive intent modeling, and mixed reality. His industry of focus today is healthcare: Giulio’s projects include sense of time studies, the use of VR to treat mental health disorders, and the use of conversational agents to support active aging and formulate a patient’s story.

Giulio is also a Board Member at Etsimo – a startup developing a platform for delivering data-driven digital health solutions (you can learn more about Etsimo in our interview with CEO Thomas Grandell here).

Giulio, considering your vast background in computer science, what is the story of how you became active in the digital health space?

My research is indeed centered around human-computer interaction, and, let’s say, around studying user experiences and technology that supports people doing what they want to do in better ways. Quite a long time ago, I started looking closer at how technology can support changes in people’s behavior and adapting sustainable practices in different areas, like saving energy or choosing more sustainable means of transport. Eventually I became involved in applying the change behavior approach to the health domain, including mental wellbeing.

For example, one of the projects I work on is about gestational diabetes. The use of technology could be extremely helpful for at-risk women because they are going through a very challenging moment in life: their bodies are changing, their lives are changing, they have to rethink exercise, diet, and so on. It’s quite a lot to handle, and technology can be used to support this change behavior.

Another area with ample opportunities to benefit from technologies such as AI or VR is mental health, and I’m also quite active in this segment.

Tell us more about the research you are doing in the mental health space.

I am involved in a project called VirtualTimes that uses VR to help people with disorders like anxiety, depression, or autism. The project is a European multidisciplinary consortium of neuroscientists, therapists, VR, and technology experts that is coordinated by German Forschungszentrum Jülich, one of the largest research centers in Europe. Among other partners, we have the University of Helsinki and Psious, a company that uses technologies such as VR and AR to treat anxiety disorders and is also developing a VR platform for therapists and mental health professionals. (Xavier Palomer Ripoll, Cofounder of Psious, took part in the 2019 Frontiers Health Conference as a speaker and was also involved in Frontiers Health Fast Track in Barcelona.)

There are plenty of companies in the market that use VR to deal with mental health issues, but there are two things that are completely new about our project. First, we are conducting research on manipulating human sense of time to study and potentially treat mental health disorders. Sense of time is a shared experience, but it can be disturbed for people with psychopathological conditions. For example, patients suffering from depression are more likely to feel ‘stuck in time.’ Time disturbances are also reported by schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder patients.

At VirtualTimes, we are using VR to speed up or slow down the time experience of patients. For example, we put them in a virtual waiting room and measure their reaction to different objects and stimulus. The velocity of a virtual sun in a VR scene in particular influences people’s sense of time.

Second, another novelty of VirtualTimes is the use of electroencephalography (EEG) in our research. The electrode sensors measure the micromovements of your muscles, variations in your heart rate, and changes in your skin’s electrical properties (when you get excited or angry, your perspiration increases, which influences how your skin conducts electricity). Leveraging these two novelties allows us to measure patients’ reactions very carefully and extract a lot of data from the studies.

Does that mean we can find a cure for depression and anxiety by manipulating our sense of time?

Although it’s a long-term objective that we hope to achieve in a few years’ time, the idea of VirtualTimes is to investigate whether we can understand more about mental health disorders and possibly even find a VR-based therapy for them by changing our perception of time. Virtual rooms can be also used to diagnose what kind of type of disorder you might have. Obviously, we can control variables such as density, speed of movement, and synchronization, which would be much more complicated to measure during a real-world session.

Another digital health area attracting a lot of attention right now is longevity and aging. Can you reveal more details about your work around this?

Formulator is another startup that I’m working on together with an Italian colleague who is an expert in AI healthcare applications, Professor Giuseppe Riccardi from the University of Trento. We use conversational agents to formulate the stories of patients seeking mental health help instead of standard questionnaires.

Our approach is more narrative than the existing questionnaires that are used to determine what is wrong with a patient, and we aim to have the right questions in the right sequence to have a consistent story about their issues. This story is then presented to the medical professional(s) and patient so that both can align and provide feedback. Obviously, digitizing the stories is key here because it provides an exceptional view of the patient’s background and uses quite homogeneous data.

I am also curating another European research project centered around active aging called CO-ADAPT. The consortium formed to carry out this project leverages renowned research groups and commercial players from Finland, Belgium, and Italy and is coordinated by the University of Helsinki.

It’s a complex project consisting of various phases and studies that aim to support healthy aging – with a strong focus on mental wellbeing – and workability, that is to preserve peoples’ capabilities as they age. By the way, another member of the consortium, the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, is esteemed worldwide for their contribution to workability.

The portion of CO-ADAPT that I’m most involved in is the use of conversational agents that could accompany aging people and collect data about them to help with everyday choices and engage them in positive change behaviors. We run studies involving people over 50 looking for support with mental issues. We want to discover how the everyday use of conversational agents might be helpful to their wellbeing.

Chatbots are already everywhere, but I think most are created to enforce established healthy behaviors. What I mean is, when you have already decided you should walk more, there is a technology to help you walk more, set your targets, and so on. But how do you actually decide you need to walk more? Why not run or use a bicycle or some other option?

Here we step into the area of preventive medicine…

And to me it is one of the most fascinating digital health challenges! It is very much connected with change behavior in health. Because if you’re healthy, why should you, let’s say, stop drinking? When do you need to decide to reduce your alcohol consumption if you don’t have any bad effects yet, but might develop them in future? How do you actually achieve this preventive approach?

I am excited about preventive medicine because there are infinite number of ways to lead it. When you go to see a doctor for a preventive consultation, what should happen during this session? In Finland, when you turn 50, you’re invited for a health check. But what is the evidence-based approach we should follow to perform this? Which questions should be asked exactly? It’s a complex thing to address, so we see a lot of potential in the preventive medicine use of conversational agents that will allow us to rely on extensive data and help document the history of a particular patient. Consequently, we do a lot of work with CO-ADAPT to determine what kind of assessment and personalized recommendations are needed to stimulate healthy behaviors.

Can this preventive approach be applied to both physical and mental health?

You may have noticed that the latest healthcare trends follow the idea that distinguishing between purely mental and purely physical issues is not always clear-cut. One line of thinking that I see emerging more frequently is that when dealing with a patient who has, for example, diabetes, a mental health aspect must be included in the diagnosis and treatment process.

I’ve also seen research moving in the direction of an integrated outlook on physical and mental wellbeing. According to general practitioners, a big percentage of patients seeking help for physical problems in the general health sector have psychological rather than physical factors underlying their condition.

It means that if we think of reducing public health costs, we need to rethink, first, how we approach diagnostics and prevention using all available patient data, and second, how to build treatment processes so that mental health issues aren’t overlooked in dealing with physical diseases. This is where we start talking about the digital and organizational transformation of healthcare in general.

This year, Frontiers has been a global Hybrid conference. In line with the “new normal” situation, the format of the 2020 edition has been hybrid, combining online global streaming together with offline events and activities held at hubs in multiple locations such as Italy, Germany, Finland, Spain, the USA, Switzerland and more.

It has been dedicated to digital health innovation in the context of the “new normal”, focusing on telemedicine, digital therapies, breakthrough technologies, patient-centricity, healthcare transformation and ecosystem development.

You can read the full live coverage on the pharmaphorum dedicated pages: Day 1 – Day 2

Digital therapeutics are a nascent corner of the healthcare technology industry. With few precedents available outside of novel drugs or medical devices, it would make sense that Pear Therapeutics, Proteus and other digital therapeutics companies furthest along the regulatory pipeline align themselves with industry partners well versed in selling and supporting a medical product.

As such, it came as a bit of a surprise when Akili Interactive Labs CEO and cofounder Eddie Martucci casually mentioned that his company would be bucking the trend of its contemporaries by building its own distribution platform for the video game-based therapeutic, as opposed to relying on relationships and sales channels of an established pharmaceutical company.

Read the full article at mobihealthnews.com

Please tell us about your background and what your role entails.

My role, as the Head of Science Policy at the ABPI, involves working on issues which affect our member companies in the early stages of the drug development process – so this includes basic research in the laboratory, research with animals, phase 1 clinical trials using experimental medicines – and ensuring the UK remains an attractive place to research and develop new medicines.

Prior to working at the ABPI, I worked in the Policy & Knowledge team at Prostate Cancer UK for over four years and, before that, I was working in the labs at King’s College London for my PhD in immunology of asthma and allergy.

The ABPI recently produced a VR-based experience showing breakthrough medicine. Why did you choose this format?

Our virtual reality (VR) film ‘Welcome to the Future of Medicine’, which we launched at our Annual Conference in April, uses a mix of computer-generated imagery and live action laboratory footage from a working diagnostics lab to take the user on a 360-degree journey into the world of breakthrough medicine, going inside the body to explore how the technologies being researched today may transform the treatments of tomorrow. The use of VR brings this vision to life and explains complex science in an easy and understandable way.

What are you hoping to achieve with it?

We made the film with Inition to show what ground-breaking medicines and treatments are on the horizon in the next 20 years. We wanted to bring to life some complex science and help people understand what the new therapies and innovations will be in the future. This film is an excellent vehicle to show what the experience could be like for patients, their families and health care professionals. It is a great place to start conversations about how we work together to make the most of these amazing opportunities, as well as looking at the challenges of how we get there. We had a positive reaction from our members when we premiered the film at our conference and we will be showing it at other external events over the next 12 months. It is also good content for our work with schools and universities.

Please describe some of the ground-breaking science that could one day become routine in healthcare.

Healthcare is seeing significant change right now and this is predicted to continue over the next 20-30 years. The key drivers include changing demographics and disease prevalence, changes in how healthcare is provided and advances in scientific understanding. The film features several ground-breaking discoveries that are being investigated around the world, and which have the potential to one day be used in routine care:
– Gene editing and gene therapies: Gene therapy aims to repair the direct cause of genetic disease by cutting out faulty sections of DNA and replacing them with slices of genetic material. Researchers are already looking at using it to treat Haemophilia B and investigating its potential to tackle other diseases, like cancer and infections.
– Inhalable diagnostic sensors in the body: US researchers are investigating the potential of carbon nanosensors that are 100,000 times smaller than a strand of hair to identify infection and inflammation in hip-implant patients and people with catheters. They have the potential to be used to monitor for disease and alert clinicians.
– 3D printing of medicine patches: UK scientists are currently developing and testing 3D-printed patches from various polymer grades that could allow controlled release of medicine into the body, making medicines more clinically effective.

What most excites you about the future of healthcare?

The power of patient data and their potential to be used to personalise care.

The drive towards patient-centric care will be partly due to the availability of personalised medicine

The sophistication with which this will be possible in the future, thanks to technology, is unprecedented. If information within the healthcare system, currently stored in multiple disparate databases, can be linked and combined with genomic information, then tools such as machine learning and artificial intelligence will have a huge impact in allowing healthcare professionals to be able to identify the exact treatment or combination of treatments for an individual patient. […]

What role do you see for the pharma industry in this brave new world?

I think it will be about partnership working. New science is so complex that no one organisation can hold all the knowledge to make the next generation of medicines, so progress will very much depend on partnership working. Partnerships between academia, the pharma industry, research charities and the NHS will enable patients to live longer, healthier and more productive lives. There are already good examples in the UK and we need to build on these. […]

How is the ABPI evolving to help members manage the changing environment the industry faces?

Our key role is to work with people from different organisations to collectively understand the challenges and opportunities for science and health. We need to work with our members, government, the NHS, charities, academia and many others.

The obvious challenge facing our industry currently is Brexit

Brexit poses an uncertain future for the pharmaceutical regulatory environment with a potential impact on access to treatments for patients living in the UK and in the EU. Every month, 45 million packs of medicine move from the UK to the EU, with 37 million moving the other way. Securing cooperation on the regulation, trade and supply of medicines must be a priority for both the UK Government and the EU. The ABPI is working hard to ensure that the issues facing our members are understood and acted upon wherever possible.
We’re also working with the Brexit Health Alliance, comprising of the NHS, medical research, industry, patients, and public health organisations, to ensure that issues such as healthcare research, access to technologies and treatment of patients are given the prominence and attention they deserve in the Brexit negotiations, such as regulatory alignment and a strong funding commitment to the health and public health sectors.

Aside from Brexit, investment will be needed in an integrated, digital, patient-centric system, which supports patients from prevention, through diagnosis and personalised treatment, using new technologies and treatments as they become available. This will have to be underpinned by adequate development of workforces to provide future healthcare.[…]

Be that as it may, with the proliferation of breakthrough innovation occurring at a greater clip than at any other time in history, why has the healthcare experience remained largely unchanged over the past decade? Innovation has permeated virtually every facet of the consumer landscape, evolving experiences in retail, fashion, CPG and consumer electronics, with companies like the FAANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) completely re-imaging the way people do business across their respective ecosystems. Even within financial services, a sector mired in legacy systems, entrenched employees, calcified ideals and excessive regulation, innovation has still found a way to thrive; catalysed by a throng of aggressive upstarts, who have challenged the authoritative and long-established players and market forces.

Just think of all the financial experiences that are unfolding around us at this very moment: now people can apply for loans online and get approval in seconds. They can securely send money in real-time or utilise blockchain for car loans, insurance and even deposits. They can invest in startups or leverage robo advisors to consistently track or beat the S&P, FTSE, DAX and CAC. All of this would have been unheard of just a few short years ago. Yet in healthcare, breakthrough innovations like these are few and far between. Many doctors still use paper records. The wait to see good doctors is typically long and adherence remains stagnant, even though the technology to evolve these persistent issues has improved by leaps and bounds. At this point, the tide has risen and the only boat remaining behind is that of healthcare.

Having facilitated many patient and HCP surveys and interviews, the collective frustration of these audiences is even further pronounced in instances where patients are navigating from customer-centric experiences, like those orchestrated by Amazon or Spotify, to run-of-the-mill healthcare experiences. Things like ratings and reviews, recommendations, the ability to easily share content with friends and family members, all feel light years ahead of the clunky healthcare experiences.

For the longest time, Pharma has pointed to tight regulation and has used that as an excuse, sort of like an absolution from the responsibility to champion innovative patient and HCP experiences. Presuming this argument still holds up as the precipice of a new year closes in, how has financial services, which was consistently ranked as one of the least innovative sectors by publications such as Forbes, now made the transition to one of the most innovative sectors?

The responsibility to innovate should not be taken lightly. In the case of financial services, startups may have played a significant role in how rapidly the space was disrupted, but once that happened, to the credit of the larger institutions, old, calcified processes were eschewed for newer more agile ones; new talent, resources, governance and technology were sought out. Change agents from other verticals were introduced and indoctrinated to catalyse innovation. Enhanced experiences and change management ensued. The pace of change was not only impressive, but also the depth and breadth of that change. From the top down and bottom up, behemoth financial institutions were completely retooled to operate more flexibly, more agilely and with a renewed focus on how each and every stakeholder experienced the brand.

That time is NOW for healthcare, and Pharma must take the reins by accelerating the pace of change and employing an innovations-focused mindset. The most encouraging consideration might be that much of the technology needed to foster and galvanise this change already exists. From virtual reality, AR and 360 degree video, to natural language processing, marketing automation, programmatic endemic and dynamic feedback loops; many of these breakthrough innovations have been discussed in much greater detail at Frontiers Health. In fact, Gerry Chille and I have had dissected customer experience in the context of innovation; unpacking problems that have been explicitly laid out and identified by top healthcare stakeholders. Our goal has been to address some of the most significant concerns of these patients, caregivers, HCPs and Payers, all examined through the lens of innovation.

Imagine how dismayed a patient/consumer must be every time he or she navigates from a customer-centric experience to a healthcare experience, either on or offline? Greater parity between these experiences must be found to truly usher in innovation in healthcare. Whether that means innovating the in-office experience and point-of-care, enhancing the way people search for health information and treatment, or extending care beyond the doctor’s office to create connected ecosystems of support.