NBIF Innovation Research Chair Erik Scheme Talks Wearables for Healthcare

By Heather MacLean, InvestNB | Link to original article

Everywhere you turn today, you see new research and products related to wearable technology. Some have been successful while others have R&D issues forcing them back to the drawing board. The real question however: what are the implications for healthcare, and how do we manage our own health? Great question? It sure is and that is why we checked in with Dr. Erik Scheme, the NBIF Innovation Research Chair in Medical Devices and Technology, located at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, to learn how New Brunswick is focused on success in this exciting field! We thank Dr. Scheme for taking time for this. He has been incredibly busy in this new field!

MacLean: In 2014 you were named the New Brunswick Innovation Research Chair in Medical Devices and Technology by the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation. Where does wearable technology fit into this?

Dr. Scheme: Interestingly, my focus isn’t specifically on wearable technology.  My background is in biological signal processing and human-machine interfaces, whether it’s been speech recognition, biometrics, or neural control of prosthetics.  The tie-in with wearable tech falls out naturally, because wearables are all about interfacing with a person.

We have to be careful though, because as the commercial market for wearable tech grows, the more the term gets associated with fitness trackers and intelligent glasses.  There is a big difference between this class of consumer devices and true medical technology that has to undergo rigorous regulatory approval before it can be used to diagnose, monitor, or treat a medical condition.

MacLean: Your mandate is to position New Brunswick as a world leader in the discovery, innovation and commercialization of medical devices and technologies. Tell us more about that and how your research is currently going?

Dr. Scheme: Yes, that’s the long-term plan.  Obviously, there will be challenges, but I think that New Brunswick has plenty to be excited about. We’re already seeing from our successes in the Information, Communications and Technology (ICT) sector, that companies are being attracted to New Brunswick because of our innovative ideas and the dedication of our people. Couple that with the leading medical and bioscience research being done across the province and an international reputation for rehabilitation engineering, and you’ve got the building blocks for sustainable economic benefit.  The key will be to build a framework that will attract companies and keep them in New Brunswick, and that will support small businesses and entrepreneurs that want to build medical technology companies here.

We already have some excellent support agencies in the province, on the entrepreneurial side and on the health and biosciences side, which are going above and beyond to help make that a reality.  The more we spread the word though, the more I’m amazed at how many people are coming forward with skills, experience and knowledge in this sector who are willing to help.

MacLean: The wearable industry in general is expected in increase by 38% in 2015 over 2014 and 145% in 2018 over 2014. What do you see for the medical side of things?

Dr. Scheme: I think they’re going to go hand-in-hand, in some sense. We’re starting to see a lot of companies and start-ups focusing on the intersection between healthcare and technology.  Not only are there exciting new technologies emerging, but there are very viable opportunities to innovate using existing technologies to create efficiencies and reduce costs in the healthcare system.  There are also a number of wearable sensor technologies and mobile medical devices that I think are going to make health research more accessible.  Eventually, we’re going to start seeing a real global demand to democratize healthcare.

MacLean: Do you see the work you and others are doing as something that could completely disrupt the medical industry and how people are treated?

Dr. Scheme: We’d like to think so.  Certainly there is a health informatics movement that is already changing the culture around health data, and I’m excited about using medical devices to provide clinicians with objective, contextual data.  It’s important to identify where our collective strengths are though, and really drill down in those areas of expertise.  If you look around the world, the real game changers, the disrupters, are coming from places where they’ve specialized to the extreme. It would be naïve to say we’re going to be the best in something as vast as medical devices, but if we focus in deep on our core strengths, I think we can carve out a niche.  We know that our strengths, at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBME) at UNB, are in rehabilitation, mobility, and monitoring, but we’re just one piece of the puzzle. We’re planning a ‘state of the science’ style gathering for the province to bring everyone together – business, clinicians, researchers, and the supporting agencies –  to get everyone’s input on where we should focus as a province.

MacLean: Right now there is a lot of talk around wearable devices for everything from looking inside veins, to measuring hydration in people, to monitoring sleep behaviour to monitoring heart rates and physical activity to even measuring body temperature. What areas will you and your team be looking at?

Dr. Scheme: That’s a great question.  As I said, at the IBME, we have core strengths in rehabilitation, mobility and monitoring, so I obviously have a lot of interest in those areas.  My role as the chair, though, is to work with industry to identify new opportunities for innovation and to help them develop competitive advantage through R&D. It’s really hard for small medical device companies to bring a product to market. It’s even harder to divert resources away from that to take a risk on the next great idea. Continued innovation is particularly crucial in the medtech industry though; you can’t survive on incremental improvements to a product line. I’d like to help New Brunswick companies by establishing an ecosystem that will help them commercialize that first product while allowing them to offset some of the risk associated with R&D of the next big idea.  In the end, I’m flexible in terms of the research we do, as long as it’s good science and it helps build the New Brunswick economy.  If we don’t have the subject matter expert that a particular company needs, I’ll help find one for them, and hopefully learn something new along the way.

MacLean: Where do you think the future of wearables will lead in terms of employers, insurers and even the legal systems leveraging data from wearable devices that track and monitor various vital statistics?

Dr. Scheme: Having contextual data, recorded unobtrusively in the home and on the job, will provide caregivers with much greater insight. Mobile and wearable devices will allow patients to diagnose basic conditions in the home, hopefully alleviating some of the burden on the healthcare system.  Access to these data for high level analytics will be invaluable for understanding regional and global health trends, and will help validate and improve different therapies.

I think we’re going to see some very interesting questions around the rights to health data though.  Consider the benefits of having objective, in situ, health data; patients will be able to better self-manage chronic conditions, or push themselves during recovery.  On the other hand, though, will employers be able to use these data to argue for faster return to work times, or for insurers to deny health claims?

MacLean: Do you see a cluster building here in New Brunswick that will focus on the various components of the ecosystem for wearable technology? What can you tell me about that?

Dr. Scheme: We want to develop a cluster around what our core competencies are as a province.  We’re going to bring together all of the stakeholders in the medical technologies sector, and hopefully identify one core area that we can really focus in on.  I expect that wearable tech will have a role to play though, simply because there is so much room for innovation in the intersection of healthcare, mobile technologies, and ICT.

MacLean: Anything else you would like to share about your research, work and where things are headed?

Dr. Scheme: It’s going to take a lot of hustle and cooperation, but I think we have a real opportunity to build this sector in New Brunswick. We have world-class researchers and innovators, and dedicated support agencies.  I think there’s a certain amount of education around investment and commercialization of medical devices that is needed, but there are some excellent people with a lot of knowledge in that area too.  Ultimately, we’re going to keep working away, surrounding ourselves with great people, and trust that great things will happen.