The world’s first smart diabetic boot allows remote patient monitoring
04 October 2022
A new wearable solution from Sensoria Health is able to heal diabetic foot ulcers and reduce the risk of amputations – as well as providing behavioural feedback to patients.
Sensoria Health (the developer of remote patient monitoring and AI wearable solutions) and Defender (next-generation designer and manufacturer of innovative foot care solutions for people with complex foot care issues) have announced at the DFCON Conference the availability of the Foot Defender powered by Sensoria Smart Boot, the world’s first smart diabetic footwear.
Available now, the Foot Defender powered by Sensoria is designed to help heal diabetic foot ulcers and reduce the risk of amputations for extended quality of life.
The solution combines the Foot Defender Smart Boot with Sensoria Core microelectronics and the Sensoria Patient Mobile App and Clinician Dashboard to monitor a patient’s diabetic foot ulcer healing and rehabilitation compliance to the clinician’s prescribed stabilisation and mechanical offloading protocol.
The Foot Defender is designed to improve patient adherence to mechanical offloading, monitors patient usage and activity, improves outcomes, and reduces healthcare cost.
It was designed by Dr Jason Hanft, a leading Podiatrist, together with a former Nike shoe designer, Michael DiTullio. It was designed to create a protective boot specifically built better to protect foot wounds in a form factor that patients will actually want to wear.
Shoe-like design alleviates foot contact pressure by up to 50 percent
The Foot Defender has an easy-to-use shoe-like design with a low-profile abrasion resistant compression-moulded outsole that alleviates average contact pressure across the foot by up to 50 percent, as compared to other protective boots on the market.
Used for both stabilisation and offloading, the boot is non-intrusive, cost-effective, and readily usable or embeddable and deployable for a broad spectrum of devices and patient types, whether they are bed-bound, chair-bound, or ambulatory.
The Foot Defender is compliant with the IWGDF guidelines and is the most referenced product in the latest offloading clinical gold standard guidelines. It is also currently being validated by USC Keck School of Medicine and Baylor College of Medicine, which received a $2.5M R01 NIH grant to validate its clinical value.
Reduce the risk of diabetic amputations
In the United States, 80 million people will be older than 65 years of age in the next few years, according to the CDC. In addition, every 20 seconds worldwide, a limb is amputated due to diabetes; and every 1.2 seconds, there is a new diabetic foot ulcer (there is no amputation without an ulcer).
After an amputation, there is a 50 percent chance that the same patient will have the other limb amputated within two years, with patient five-year life expectancy worse than most cancers.
In addition, diabetic foot ulcers are responsible for more hospitalisations than any other complication of diabetes, driving direct costs of at least $40 billion annually worldwide and at least $17.5 billion in the US alone.
“Usually, subjects with diabetic foot ulcerations wear their offloading devices in just 28 percent of their daily steps. And there is strong evidence that uncomplicated plantar ulcers can be healed in eight to 12 weeks. Yet, the current standard of care in US clinical trials has a 76 percent treatment failure rate at 12 weeks,” said Dr David G. Armstrong, Professor of Surgery at USC Keck School of Medicine.
“Through the marriage of Sensoria Health’s sensors with the Foot Defender, AI/ML algorithms, custom microelectronics, and remote monitoring cloud software, the system extends the reach of clinicians and potentially contributes to deliver[ing] better outcomes for our patients.
“By injecting sensing technology into footwear and garments that are already a part of the patient workflow, we can likely improve adherence, accurately monitor patients, improve outcomes, and reduce healthcare cost around the world."
“Combining Foot Defender with Sensoria’s smart technology offers the best of biomechanical engineering and modern footwear design with mobile, plus cloud patient monitoring to promote faster healing, improve overall compliance and ensure healthier outcomes,” commented Dr Hanft.
“It’s a game-changing solution that brings the science of off-loading and protecting diabetic feet into the 21st century.”
Availability
The Foot Defender powered by Sensoria is available now. For more information, click here, contact Sensoria Health here or contact Defender to purchase here.