Intel-GE Care Innovations, a pioneer in connecting the care continuum to the home, and Kinesis Health Technologies, an innovative medical device company, announced a partnership to market and distribute QTUG, a Mobility and Falls Risk assessment technology.
The partnership focuses on helping the healthcare and senior living communities more proactively and aggressively prevent falls. QTUG is designed to give a more comprehensive view of an individual’s risk of falling.
Based on seven years of clinical data, QTUG (Quantitative Timed Up and Go) allows both clinicians and health plans to effectively evaluate the therapy services rendered and understand when more or less therapy may be needed.
QTUG is intended for use by healthcare professionals who assess falls risk in older adults, such as falls specialists within hospitals and community-based care nurses to help eliminate falls for residents.
Unlike current falls assessment techniques, QTUG provides an exact, quantitative evaluation of the many dimensions that make up a person’s propensity to trip or fall and provides the clinician with a detailed assessment of what elements need to be addressed through therapy.
"Falls are a major cause of injury and hospitalization, especially among older Americans. I believe our partnership with Kinesis Health Technologies will bring physical therapists and other clinicians a superior method of determining an individual’s risk for falling, and provide the necessary support and information in order to intervene and reduce that risk," said Sean Slovenski, Chief Executive Officer at Care Innovations.
The QTUG system uses body-worn tri-axial gyroscopes and accelerometers – wireless inertial sensors – mounted on each leg combined with signal processing and machine learning methods to provide quantitative assessment of mobility and falls risk, as well as statistical comparisons against a large reference population relative to norms for age and gender. The collected data is streamed wirelessly via Bluetooth to a touchscreen tablet device that displays the calculated results.
In addition to identifying those patients at high risk of falls, QTUG can be used to assess a patient’s response to therapy on an on-going basis.
Care Innovations and Kinesis Health Technologies are focused on expanding falls screening programs for the aging population initially in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom and Ireland.