TRUE ANGLE TO STUDY THE MOBILI-T IN COMBINATION WITH VARIAN’S NOONA PATIENT ENGAGEMENT PLATFORM IN THE TREATMENT OF SWALLOWING DISORDERS
Research project, supported by an Alberta Innovates Grant, seeks to improve patient outcomes through integration of health technology.
Edmonton, Alberta – True Angle, a health technology company, has launched a research project to explore the use of health technology to improve patient outcomes in the treatment of dysphagia (or swallowing disorder), supported by a grant from Alberta Innovates.
The research project involves the deployment of True Angle’s Mobili-T system with the digital Noona® platform from Varian, a Siemens Healthineers company. Noona is a digital solution for patient engagement and outcomes management, originally developed for use in oncology. The plan is to utilize Noona together with True Angle’s Mobili-T swallowing exercise system, which is used to treat dysphagia, a common condition for patients dealing with head and neck cancer, Parkinson’s, or stroke.
The grant from Alberta Innovates will enable True Angle to work with the Edmonton-based Institute for Reconstructive Sciences in Medicine (iRSM) and the University of Alberta Hospital Department of Head and Neck Surgery in conducting this research. This will potentially inform a value-based healthcare model initiated by iRSM to provide better outcomes for cancer patients.
True Angle’s Mobili-T system provides a data-driven, easy-to-use, and motivating IoT experience that helps people take control of their own well-being. Varian’s Noona software application is highly complementary to Mobili-T as it empowers patients to remotely report on how they are feeling, delivering key data to healthcare providers while at home or otherwise outside the clinical environment. The combination of these two innovations has the potential to improve patient engagement: in this case – from diagnosis through to recovery post-surgery.
The research team will seek to leverage combined data from True Angle’s Mobili-T system and Noona’s real-time remote symptom reporting to enhance communication between patients and their clinical teams before and after surgery. This provides an opportunity to preempt follow-up hospital stays associated with cancer treatment in patients with dysphagia or other complications after surgery.
Bruce Birdsell, Varian VP of Digital Oncology, said “We are excited by this opportunity to empower and support patients, as well as healthcare providers, through enhanced communication. Promoting greater engagement among patients and clinical teams has the potential to enable earlier intervention and preempt emergency room visits, and we believe the combination of these innovative technologies may help us do just that. We look forward to continuing to advance patient-focused, high-value healthcare technologies as we work to create a world without fear of cancer.”
Jana Rieger, CEO of True Angle elaborated, “The power of objectively captured data is what wearables bring to patient-reported outcomes systems like Noona. This bringing together of subjective and objective data provides the surgeon, and the whole clinical team, a more complete picture of the patient’s health-at-home experience. Because much of cancer care happens in the home, this becomes extremely important. For our two companies, the understanding of how the two types of data relate to one another will provide a powerful foundation upon which we can begin to combine information from both to make our programs and interventions more effective for physicians and patients.”
About True Angle
True Angle was spun out of the University of Alberta in 2017 by its Co-founder and CEO, Dr. Jana Rieger, moving the technology out of the lab, and into the hands of the people who needed it. A global leader in functional outcomes assessment related to head and neck disorders, Jana and the team at True Angle have developed the Mobili-T: a wearable device that uses software-enabled biofeedback technology to deliver a clinically-validated method to target swallowing function for the 500 million people globally who are suffering from a swallowing disorder because of common medical conditions such as stroke, Parkinson’s Disease, or head and neck cancer.
About Noona
The Noona software application for patient engagement is designed to engage patients in their care with real-time remote symptom reporting and monitoring. Noona enables clinics to capture “Patient Reported Outcomes” and send communication and education materials directly to patients. Noona’s intuitive user interface creates an engaging experience for patients that encourages a high rate of adoption and adherence over long periods of time. Noona helps streamline a patients’ experience throughout their journey which can lead to improved outcomes by empowering patients to digitally connect and engage with their care.
Contact: Dr. Jana Rieger, CEO
True Angle. info@trueanglemedical.com