Bluetooth health monitoring lets you upload your vital stats to your doctor from home

Traditionally, diagnosis and monitoring of sleep apnea has required patients to spend the night in a sleep laboratory connected to ECGs and blood oximeters. But the unfamiliar environment of the sleep lap is very different to the comfort of a patient's own bedroom, and the experience can be quite traumatic, particularly for the very young and very old - which no doubt has an effect on results.

The Alive devices make the experience vastly less invasive and more convenient. Satchwell explains: "The Alive Pulse Oximeter just clips on your finger and transmits remotely to your phone - there's no need to spend the night at a sleep lab. The data just gets sent to the lab in the morning and gives them everything they need to assess your condition. There's been a real need for a simple, comfortable method to screen for sleep apnea in your own home. It's also a convenient and a non-invasive way to measure the effectiveness of various treatments over the course of a night's sleep."

The bluetooth oximeter is also of interest to pilots, mountaineers and others involved in physical efforts at high altitudes where atmospheric oxygen levels can drop quite low. "We've got an expedition to Everest taking our gear up with them soon," says Satchwell, "they'll be able to log and upload their blood oxygen levels at intervals as they go up."

Diabetes management

Alive's Diabetes Management System is designed to reduce reporting error and increase convenience in diabetic glucose level management. Instead of the normal routine of pin-pricking the finger, measuring glucose levels and writing them down, the Alive system simply stores a log of the data which can be transmitted at intervals to an endocrinologist who can intervene with various treatments or suggestions when changes are detected.

Exercise and training logging

"While most of our work is in medical applications, we're also seeing plenty of potential for this equipment in athletic training," says Satchwell, "because it allows you to log a fantastic amount of information about your daily training. Take a runner or a cyclist for example. We're developing a system that we call the Alive Sports System where your heart rate monitor connects to a bluetooth GPS phone and logs your speed, location and heart rate through the duration of your daily run.

"When you're done, you upload the information to our system and you can watch your whole exercise session over again in fast-forward. You watch your little man running around on a Google Map of the neighbourhood. A sidebar shows how fast you were going, what your heart-rates were at every step of the way and even, with the mini accelerometers, how much hang-time you got in the air over a particular jump. As you build up this store of data, people who are fairly serious about their training will be able to directly see their speed and fitness improving over time."

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