Medical and consumer electronics markets are converging.

Advanced semi-conductor technology is transforming the medical services market and at the forefront of this latest generation of high-tech healthcare is a new way of monitoring the human body wirelessly, intelligently and at low cost.

Breakthrough silicon technology is enabling the development of new wireless devices, with applications across a vast array of healthcare management scenarios.

Intelligent microchip-sized wireless body monitoring systems are set to generate a wealth of new healthcare applications, offering quality of life for users and providing critical medical data for healthcare professionals.

Spearheading this revolution is Toumaz, a spin-out from Imperial College London founded by wireless technology pioneer Professor Chris Toumazou.

Toumaz started up in 2000, and was the first company to move into the Culham Innovation Centre.

From there, Toumaz relocated to Milton Park and last year moved to larger premises on the park to support its 70 staff and continued expansion.

Since its foundation, Toumaz has been focused on the development of Sensium — a platform technology that is targeting a revolution in healthcare through the pervasive use of wireless ‘body area networks’.

With Sensium, Toumaz is providing the enabling technology to deliver new wireless body monitoring systems that improve productivity, cut costs and support the shift of healthcare from hospital to the home and community.

The drivers for this revolution are compelling. The global demographic trend towards ageing populations, coupled with less active lifestyles and fast-food diets, is leading to higher probability and earlier onset of chronic conditions such as Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

This translates into a substantial increase in the resources required for long-term, continuous care and a growing burden on healthcare infrastructures.

Today, 75-80 per cent of healthcare expenditure is on chronic disease, placing an unsustainable strain on healthcare providers’ resources including hospital beds.

Current patient data acquisition systems are still mostly hospital-based, expensive, generally wired — with lots of cables — and non-mobile. Even portable equipment is still large — and prohibitively expensive for pervasive use.

Sensium provides a technology platform for the development of ultra-low power, ultra-small size wireless body monitoring solutions that are body-worn, low-cost and unobstrusive.

Together with appropriate external sensors, Sensium-enabled devices allow the continuous, intelligent monitoring of multiple vital signs such as ECG, heart rate, body temperature, respiration and activity level.

This is done in real time, allowing earlier detection and prediction which will then potentially alert services for adverse events —for example, heart attacks, falls or hypoglycaemia.

Powered by thin lightweight batteries, body-worn Sensium-enabled monitors can process and extract key features of the data and intelligently integrate it into an electronic medical record via a base station.

For healthcare professionals, this delivers unprecedented possibilities for pro-active monitoring and improved quality of care at dramatically reduced cost.

For patients, this can improve lifestyle as well as offering better therapeutic outcomes.

The technology has applications across a range of healthcare and lifestyle settings, including use in hospital wards, telecare and care home scenarios and in elite sports performance optimisation.

Clinical trials at St Mary’s Hospital, London (part of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust) have demonstrated the physiological data acquired by the Sensium technology is equivalent to that acquired using existing monitoring systems in hospitals.

Until now, traditional healthcare models have not been able to offer this level of continuous care, except in intensive care units.

This ability to unlock a higher quality system of individualised patient care throughout the treatment and diagnostic cycle — from the hospital ward to the home — will be crucial to address some of the biggest global healthcare challenges, now and in the future.

Another potential area where the technology can help improve current practice is in drug trial monitoring. Sensium makes it possible to set up a monitoring system which provides continuous, high quality data, still within a clinically acceptable format.

Toumaz is also leveraging its low power wireless knowledge to develop integrated circuits that address the consumer electronics market including the development of digital radio and consumer devices connected to the Internet.

The ubiquity of wireless and mobile cellular networking, and the increasing convergence between the consumer and healthcare sectors, is driving the clear trend for ‘unwiring’ the healthcare world and increasing demand for mobile-based solutions.

As we move towards an unwired future, the market opportunity created by a merging of the consumer electronics and healthcare industries is vast, and this is certainly just the beginning of a global wireless revolution.